It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

That is the bitterest of all,--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business - that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Our thoughts are often worse than we are.