To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.