According to
Thoreau,
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.
He believed that most of us
waste our lives by being concerned about unnecessary details. We want too many things, so we
have to work to buy...
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