I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time.

There never is but one opportunity of a kind.

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.