The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.

Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.

I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.

... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.

every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.