New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.

Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with, the wind.

Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary.

Man is incomprehensible without Nature and Nature is incomprehensible apart from man. For the delicate loveliness of the flower is as much in the human eye as in its own fragile petals and in the splendor of the heavens as much in the imagination that kindles at the touch of their glory as in the shining of countless worlds.

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

It is better to go down on the great seas which human hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in ignoble anchorage.

There is no kind obondage which life lays upon us that may not yield both sweetness and strength; and nothing reveals a man's character more fully than the spirit in which he bears his limitations.