"Life Without Principle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there."

But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New
England, bred at her own school and church.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral
teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.
Most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a
gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder,
not to be too tender about these things- to lump all that, that is,
make a lump of gold of it. The highest advice I have heard on these
subjects was grovelling. The burden of it was- It is not worth your
while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not
ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do-
and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his
innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the
sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is
but one of the devil's angels. As we grow old, we live more
coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent,
cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the
extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more
unfortunate than ourselves.

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and
absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted
its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether
the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it. Why must we
daub the heavens as well as the earth? It was an unfortunate discovery
that Dr. Kane was a Mason, and that Sir John Franklin was another. But
it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly that was the reason why
the former went in search of the latter. There is not a popular
magazine in this country that would dare to print a child's thought on
important subjects without comment. It must be submitted to the
D.D.'s. I would it were the chickadee-dees.

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a
natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly
liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you
endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in
which they appear to hold stock- that is, some particular, not
universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their
own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky,
when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. Get out of the way
with your cobwebs; wash your windows, I say! In some lyceums they tell
me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do
I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I
have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast
of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never