"Life Without Principle" is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that offers his program for a righteous livelihood.
He reflects on his guilt at watching his neighbor, who was working in the early morning hours, from the comfort of his own home.
Thoreau asserts that he requires no direction from the "police of meaningless labor" in determining how to spend his time.
The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as the boiler in the wood-cutting mill is fed with the shavings it creates.
On October 18, 1855, Thoreau was invited to participate in a series of lectures on reform at the Railroad Hall in Providence, Rhode Island.
He found a passage he had written on September 7, 1851: "I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spent it, by what means to grow rich, that the day may not have been in vain.