All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.

In December people give no thought to the Past or the Future. They thing only of the Present.

I am more fond of achieving than striving. My theories must prove to be facts or be discarded as worthless. My efforts must soon be crowned with success, or discontinued.

A living gale is better than a dead calm.

Advice ... is a habit-forming drug. You give a dear friend a bit of advice today, and next week you find yourself advising two or three friends, and the week after, a dozen, and the week following, crowds!

There are many ways of discarding [books]. You can give them to friends,--or enemies,--or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.

... ideals, standards, aspirations,--those are chameleon words, and take color from their speakers,--often false tints. A scholarly man of my acquaintance once told me that he traveled a thousand miles into the desert to get away from the word uplift, and it was the first word he heard after he reached his destination.