A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.

When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.