Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.

If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.

Too much information is rather deadening.

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.