Thoreau

Passages from "Economy"

I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and every where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.

But I wonder if herds are not the keepers of men than men the keepers of herds.

Most men . . . are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day . . . He has not time to be anything but a machine.

It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live . . . trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt . . . always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick . . .

Talk of the divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty is to fodder and water his horses.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.