Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?

If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

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

In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would bepale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.

I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood.