However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on: it is all dissipation. If you are restricted to your range by poverty…you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.
— Walden