Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.

There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.