"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. In
the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such 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. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be
necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other
things in proportion.