Life without principle

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1. treetalkerJan 2025
   Loosely related Thoreau quotation (and one of my all-time favorites), from Life Without Principle:

   > Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

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2. troutwineDec 2016
   I think "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is both charming and funny. The book is a view into the very early industrialization of the United States, as framed by two brothers taking a boat trip. I also recommend "Civil Disobedience", an essay which proposes a program of peaceful, active resistance to unjust government. This essay inspired both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Choice quotes:

   > I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.

   > There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?

   Walden is often recommended but can seem a little out of context in a world that has industrialized and tends toward bowling alone. Even so, it's worth understanding Walden for the perspective Thoreau puts forward concerning the usefulness of inventions and their reflection on and in communities.

   > As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey.

   A much shorter read in the same vein–and without all the digressions about the economics of farming beans–is "Life Without Principle". I recommend reading that first over Walden as something of a primer. By the time of Life Without Principle Thoreau was giving public lectures and had gotten better at shorter arguments (though he likely felt that to-the-point declarations were not the path to wisdom but that a round-about argument which required quiet contemplation while walking was).

   > Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance.

   Thoreau was eccentric but purposefully. He's one of America's great philosophers and well worth reading.

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3. k310Aug 2026
   Opinion: The Bible and other works, let's say, The Lotus Sutra, are metaphorical. Anything that is truly timeless is, because times change.

   Again, IMO, the purpose of metaphor is for you to create a special meaning from your experience, knowledge, mental processing and emotions, and thereby enrich the universe in Buddhist terms,[0] or otherwise, glorify a creator.

   Otherwise, as they say, "It's a Cookbook" and most get the dinner completely wrong, or become the dinner. Teachers teach us to cook. Intermediaries teach us to follow instructions, because if they taught us to cook, they lose their "privileged" position.

        “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.” [1]
   
   
   
       Heaven is not divorced from the earth; enlightenment is not separate from ordinary mind [2]
   
   
   
   

   [0] https://palisuttas.com/tag/sutra-of-innumerable-meanings/

   [1] Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

   [2] https://irarabois.com/read-the-eternities-who-knew-there-was...

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4. yesenadamMay 2022
   ...that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly- that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

   - Henry David Thoreau, from Life Without Principle, 1863

   https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper2/thoreau/life.html

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5. yesenadamFeb 2021
   No, but I used to find it very odd as a child that a stock market report was part of the daily TV news. Sounds like you just don't like sport. Anyway, getting rid of a TV was one of the best things I ever did. Highly recommended. I watch a lot of movies, series, documentaries, but only the best, exactly when I want to see them.

   We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. – Thoreau, Life Without Principle

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6. PavlovsCatOct 2019
   > The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, - chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better. The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it.

   -- Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER2/thoreau/life.html

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