When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.

Great men are excellent topics of conversation, but the superior man, the superior men, the masters, the universal spirits on horseback, have to stop and search their memories merely to know who these so-called great men might be. And so the great man is left with the crowd, the worthless majority...for his admirers.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.

You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.