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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
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(Paragrafo 9 - ^Capitro 1 "Economy")
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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor
did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I
wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then
to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness
to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be
able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men,
it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is
of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is
the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
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(^Cirka^u la douno de ^Capitro 2 - "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For")
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Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were
long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is
error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered
away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his
ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the
rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million
count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the
midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and
storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for,
that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom
and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great
calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three
meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred
dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a
German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever
fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at
any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal
improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is
just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with
furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and
heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the
million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them,
is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life
and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is
essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk
through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt,
whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like
men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge
rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon
our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads
are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at
home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on
the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers
are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a
Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand,
and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure
you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that,
if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the
misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is
walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position,
and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry
about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes
a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level
in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get
up again.
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(^Cirka^u la douno de ^Capitro 2 - "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For")
Um dia lembrei-me desse parágrafo, quando comia em uma churrascaria rodízio - clientes sentados e carnes em rodízio. Porém na hora de pagar, percebi que nós clientes é que estávamos em rodízio, enquanto o dono sentado contava nosso dinheiro. Filipe