The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

To have made even one person's life a little better, that is to succeed.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk & leaves

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.