H.D.Thoreau "You must get your living by loving"

The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever”
It says, “It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out. It doesn’t matter much to me.”
That reminds me of “Life Without Principle” by H.D. Thoreau.

Excerpt from "Life Without Principle"
Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.
If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
All great enterprises are self-supporting.

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born; but to be stillborn, rather. You must get your living by loving.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.
Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.
Written by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862 )
American author, philosopher, and naturalist
My close friend gave me "Walden, Civil disobedience and other writings on society" as a gift. At that time, it was Greek to me, but now I can read it. One joy also came to me today.
I'm so happy to recommend you one of his works.