When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.

To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.