“I do not need the po­lice of mean­ing­less la­bor to reg­u­late me.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in dan­ger of be­ing re­gard­ed as a loaf­er; but if he spends his whole day as a spec­u­la­tor, shear­ing off those woods and mak­ing earth bald be­fore her time, he is es­teemed an in­dus­tri­ous and en­ter­pris­ing cit­i­zen. As if a town had no in­ter­est in its for­ests but to cut them down!”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“The aim of the la­bor­er should be, not to get his liv­ing, to get ‘a good job,’ but to per­form well a cer­tain work; and, even in a pe­cu­ni­ary sense, it would be econ­o­my for a town to pay its la­bor­ers so well that they would not feel that they were work­ing for low ends, as for a live­li­hood mere­ly, but for sci­en­tif­ic, or even mor­al ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for mon­ey, but him who does it for love of it.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“It is re­mark­a­ble that there are few men so well em­ployed, so much to their minds, but that a lit­tle mon­ey or fame would com­mon­ly buy them off from their pres­ent pur­suit. I see ad­ver­tise­ments for ac­tive young men, as if ac­tiv­i­ty were the whole of a young man’s cap­i­tal. Yet I have been sur­prised when one has with con­fi­dence pro­posed to me, a grown man, to em­bark in some en­ter­prise of his, as if I had ab­so­lute­ly noth­ing to do, my life hav­ing been a com­plete fail­ure hith­er­to. What a doubt­ful com­pli­ment this to pay me! As if he had met me half-way across the ocean beat­ing up against the wind, but bound no­where, and pro­posed to me to go along with him!”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“The com­mu­ni­ty has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise mon­ey enough to tun­nel a moun­tain, but you can­not raise mon­ey enough to hire a man who is mind­ing his own busi­ness. An ef­fi­cient and val­u­a­ble man does what he can, wheth­er the com­mu­ni­ty pay him for it or not. The in­ef­fi­cient of­fer their in­ef­fi­cien­cy to the high­est bid­der, and are for­ev­er ex­pect­ing to be put in­to of­fice. One would sup­pose that they were rare­ly dis­ap­point­ed.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“If I should sell both my fore­noons and af­ter­noons to so­ci­e­ty, as most ap­pear to do, I am sure that for me there would be noth­ing left worth liv­ing for. I trust that I shall nev­er thus sell my birth­right for a mess of pot­tage.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“A man may be very in­dus­tri­ous, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fa­tal blun­der­er than he who con­sumes the great­er part of his life get­ting his liv­ing. All great en­ter­prises are self-sup­port­ing. The po­et, for in­stance, must sus­tain his body by his po­et­ry, as a steam plan­ing-mill feeds its boil­ers with the shav­ings it makes. You must get your liv­ing by lov­ing.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“Most men would feel in­sult­ed if it were pro­posed to em­ploy them in throw­ing stones over a wall, and then in throw­ing them back, mere­ly that they might earn their wag­es. But many are no more wor­thi­ly em­ployed now.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“Mere­ly to come in­to the world the heir of a for­tune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rath­er.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Life Without Principle

“To inherit property is not to be born — is to be still-born, rath­er.”

— Henry David Thoreau,
Journals (13 March, 1853)

“Unfortunately, it is utterly impossible for overworked teachers to preserve an instinctive liking for children; they are bound to come to feel towards them as the proverbial confectioner’s apprentice does towards macaroons. I do not think that education ought to be anyone’s whole profession: it should be undertaken for at most two hours a day by people whose remaining hours are spent away from children. The society of the young is fatiguing, especially when strict discipline is avoided. Fatigue, in the end, produces irritation, which is likely to express itself somehow, whatever theories the harassed teacher may have taught himself or herself to believe. The necessary friendliness cannot be preserved by self-control alone.”

— Bertrand Russell,
Education and Discipline

“The bourgeois morality was and is primarily a morality of work and of metier. Work purifies, ennobles; it is a virtue and a remedy. Work is the only thing that makes life worthwhile; it replaces God and the life of the spirit. More precisely, it identifies God with work: success becomes a blessing. God expresses his satisfaction by distributing money to those who have worked well. Before this first of all virtues, the others fade into obscurity. If laziness was the mother of all the vices, work was the father of all the virtues. This attitude was carried so far that bourgeois civilization neglected every virtue but work.”

― Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society (chapter 3)

“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy—to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily. And who, indeed, could help laughing?”

— Søren Kierkegaard,
Diapsalmata (from Either/Or)