We have all heard them. You know what I am talking about. All of those annoying little saying that our mom’s have told us that have so much meaning, yet tend to leave us feeling pretty dumb in the end because we know they are right. “You are what you eat.” “Trash in, trash out.” “Money is the root of all evil.” “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Yeah, we have heard them all. However, Henry David Thoreau took a slightly different view of these in his essay “Life without Principle.” To Thoreau, money wasn’t the root of evil, but making it a goal in life was. Idle hands weren’t necessarily the devil’s workshop, but idle minds were.

In “Life without Principle,” Thoreau discusses the evil of business. He closely relates business with busy-ness. He said that too much of our time was spent worrying about small things and focusing on things that don’t matter. Thoreau thought that living life for business was wrong. In the following quote, he tells of how the saddest thing to many people was someone who couldn’t work.

“If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or se

This quote states that we should avoid gossip at all costs. Garbage in and garbage out. Useless information in and you get useless information out. But, if you put knowledge in, you get knowledge out. A daily quest for knowledge was one way to not waste out time. Thoreau believed that we shouldn’t focus on whats happening right this minute, but on what has happened to make these things occur. Thoreau says to read the eternities and not the times. Half of the right this minute things are just flashes in the pan of life. It’s those tried and true eternities, mostly literature, which we can and should learn from. No time is better spent than time spent that spent in the study of the eternities, and nothing was more against them then “busyness.”

In this, he says that no one talks about anything that matters. Our lives are spent in meaningless conversations. It is to say that we talk a lot, but never really say anything.

In this quote, Thoreau compares the petty jobs on many people to that of throwing rocks over a wall, only to have them sent back. Sure, these men would be getting paid for what they did, but what good did the job bring to anyone? Why do something redundant and useless when you could do something that might change to world?

Thoreau found these things to be a waste of our time. He believed that our time here on earth was better spent doing something that we enjoy doing. Don’t just work for money, but work for the enjoyment of what you do.

“Just so hollow and ine

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