Subsistence Level

Famous quotes containing the words subsistence and/or level:

    The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, “All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.” And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)