Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.