I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.

And what is a man without energy? Nothing - nothing at all.

A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.

I could be an idiot, or I can serve in Congress, but I repeat myself.

If we could imagine such a man, that is a man who could invent the fly and send him out on his mission and furnish him with his orders: Depart into the uttermost corners of the earth and, diligently do your appointed work. Persecute the sick child, settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting, worry and fret and madden the worn and tried mother who watches by the child and humbly prays for mercy and relief with the pathetic faith of the deceived and the unteachable.