To write is a humiliation.

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.

I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.

Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.

One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.

Who has enough credit in this world to pay for his mistakes?

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.