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.

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.

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.

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

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

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