Walden

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes,
as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who
read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have
actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are
already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen
time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean
and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by
experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying
to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes
alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass;
still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always
promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today,
insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes,
only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting
yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of
thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let
you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old
chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the
brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.