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.
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.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life uch 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....
