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Quotation from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
“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!”
Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (Project Gutenberg text)
Thoreau's call to reduce affairs to two or three, set in a passage comparing ordinary life to a ship navigated by dead reckoning.
Citation: "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!" — Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (Project Gutenberg text). (id walden-q3)
Portrait: Walden Thoreau, Ticknor and Fields (publisher), Public domain.
