Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

I hate to write, but I love to have written.

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.

The only noble thing a man can do with money is to build a schooner.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.