Life Without Principle

Henry David Thoreau
Core works and topics Civil Disobedience Herald of Freedom The Last Days of John Brown Life Without Principle Paradise (to be) Regained A Plea for Captain John Brown Reform and the Reformers Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown The Service Sir Walter Raleigh Slavery in Massachusetts Thomas Carlyle and His Works Walden A Walk to Wachusett A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Thoreau Society
Related topics Abolitionism Anarchism Anarchism in the United States Civil disobedience Concord, Massachusetts Conscientious objection Direct action Ecology Environmentalism History of tax resistance Individualist anarchism John Brown Lyceum movement Nonviolent resistance Ralph Waldo Emerson Simple living Tax resistance Tax resisters Transcendentalism The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Walden Pond
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Life Without Principle is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that offers his program for a righteous livelihood.

Themes

1. Don’t cheat people by conspiring with them to protect their comfort zones.
2. Don’t make religions and other such institutions the sort of intellectual comfort zone that prevents you from entertaining ideas that aren’t to be found there.
3. Don’t cheat yourself by working primarily for a paycheck. If what you do with your life free-of-charge is so worthless to you that you’d be convinced to do something else in exchange for a little money or fame, you need better hobbies.
4. Furthermore, don’t hire someone who’s only in it for the money.
5. Sustain yourself by the life you live, not by exchanging your life for money and living off that.
6. It is a shame to be living off an inheritance, charity, a government pension, or to gamble your way to prosperity – either through a lottery or by such means as prospecting for gold.
7. Remember that what is valuable about a thing is not the same as how much money it will fetch on the market.
8. Don’t waste conversation and attention on the superficial trivialities and gossip of the daily news, but attend to things of more import: “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.”
9. Similarly, politics is something that ought to be a minor and discreet part of life, not the grotesque public sport it has become.
10. Don’t mistake the march of commerce for progress and civilization – especially when that commerce amounts to driving slaves to produce the articles of vice like alcohol and tobacco. There’s no shortage of gold, of tobacco, of alcohol, but there is a short supply of “a high and earnest purpose."

On-line sources

• Life Without Principle at Wikisource.
• Life Without Principle at The Picket Line.

Printed sources

• My Thoughts are Murder to the State by Henry David Thoreau (ISBN 978-1434804266)
• The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform (ISBN 978-0691118765)
• Collected Essays and Poems by Henry David Thoreau (ISBN 978-1-88301195-6)

v t e Henry David Thoreau Speeches Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859) Essays The Service (1840) A Walk to Wachusett (1842) Paradise (to be) Regained (1843) Sir Walter Raleigh (1844) Herald of Freedom (1844) Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845) Reform and the Reformers (1846–48) Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847) Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience (1849) Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) The Last Days of John Brown (1860) Walking (1861) Life Without Principle (1863) Books A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) Walden (1854) Related Thoreau Society The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Wheeler-Minot Farmhouse Excursions (1863)