Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.

It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.