ALCStudies Journal

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 the love of it….

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.

— Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle