The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.

Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn't break and that the enemy's did.

How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence--I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.

For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

I would strenuously urge a single term of six years.

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey.