One of my all time favourite books, and one that I will revisit often in my life. Ipsum lorem dolor. , its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing past

My notes

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty…

Most men, even in this comparitively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superflously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. … Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.