We build dwellings and thereafter they build us.

There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?

Houses are built brick-by-brick. HOMEs are built word-by-word. Houses don't build themselves. So YOU must build your home.

But the answers come when they will, one piece at a time.

You'll find that it's quite a natural act for a human to build a home.

Little by little does the trick.

They shall build houses and inhabit them;

Taking courage and looking forward from the standpoint of higher ideas born of the multiplication of the arts, they gave up huts and began to build houses with foundations, having brick or stone walls, and roofs of timber and tiles; next, observation and application led them from fluctuating and indefinite conceptions to definite rules of symmetry. Perceiving that nature had been lavish in the bestowal of timber and bountiful in stores of building material, they... embellished them with luxuries.

I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once. (p27)

Writers live in houses other people built.

This is how we make important changes — barely, poorly, slowly.

Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.

When men were scattered over the earth, protected by eaves or by the dug-out shelter of a cliff or by the trunk of a hollow tree, it was philosophy that taught them to build houses.

There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest.