After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.

It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to workour mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.

The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.