He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

Youth is always an enemy to the old.

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.