Imagination labors best in distant fields.

Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.

Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.