The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.

The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.

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.

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.

To write is a humiliation.

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.