For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward.

A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.