Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.

Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

Do not engage to find things as you think they are.

Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

The principal, the only, thing a man makes, is his condition of fate. Though commonly he does not know it, nor put up a sign to this effect, "My own destiny made and mended here." (Not yours.) He is a master workman in the business. He works twenty-four hours a day at it, and gets it done. Whatever else he neglects or botches, no man was ever known to neglect this work. A great many pretend to make shoes chiefly, and would scout the idea that they make the hard times which they experience.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.