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.

“But,” says one, “you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?”  I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.  They are but improved means to an unimproved end . . . 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.

I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

All things considered, that is, considering the importance of a man’s soul and of to-day . . . I believe that I was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keeper of herds as herds the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.

Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries . . .

A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time so spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.  It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we live simply and wisely.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.  It is human, it is divine, carrion.  If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life . . .

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means.  I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.