"Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies."

"So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend."

"Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker."

"Nothing like a little judicious levity."

"Youth is wholly experimental."

"I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way."

"In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy."

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."

"Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life."

"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye."

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

"Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."

"Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort."

"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral."

"To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."

"Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach."

""True success is to labor," you said./Though you died at forty-four,/who does more than what you did?/Making pages that would live so long... islands/as treasures.../human lives as treasures../you took a deep breath,/opened your packet of cheese and fruit, curled into/the words."

"Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain."

"The writer of modern times who seems to us most like the "simple great ones gone," Robert Louis Stevenson, owes much of his excellence to his modesty in being subject to restraint and his good sense in burdening himself with no partial doctrines to expound."

"Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."

"; instead, ."

"The commonplaces are the great poetic truths."

"The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble."

"To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement."

"Ice and iron cannot be welded."

"And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied."

"Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home!"

"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate."

"God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff."

"In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes."

"Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them."

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night."

"The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

"Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me."

"To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto."

"Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion."

"Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others."

"To men a man is but a mind. Who cares What face he carries or what form he wears? But woman's body is the woman. O, Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go, But heed the warning words the sage hath said: A woman absent is a woman dead."

"Absent, adj. Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction; vilifed; hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration and affection of another."

"Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward a straiter resemblance to the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death, and the hope of Hell."

"Before undergoing a surgical operation arrange your temporal affairs. You may live."

"Intolerance is natural and logical, for in every dissenting opinion lies an assumption of superior wisdom."

"A kiss is but a modified bite, and a fond mother, when she rapturously avers that her babe is 'almost good enough to eat,' merely shows that she is herself only a trifle too good to eat it."

"Riven and torn with cannon-shot, the trunks of the trees protruded bunches of splinters like hands, the fingers above the wound interlacing with those below."

"I suppose the country lying between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing could boast a few inhabitants other than alligators. What manner of people they were it is impossible to say, inasmuch as the fighting dispersed, or possibly exterminated them; perhaps in merely classing them as non-saurian I shall describe them with sufficient particularity and at the same time avert from myself the natural suspicion attaching to a writer who points out to persons who do not know him the peculiarities of persons whom he does not know. One thing, however, I hope I may without offense affirm of these swamp-dwellers--they were pious. To what deity their veneration was given--whether, like the Egyptians, they worshiped the crocodile, or, like other Americans, adored themselves, I do not presume to guess. But whoever, or whatever, may have been the divinity whose ends they shaped, unto Him, or It, they had builded a temple. This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle."

"Hidden in hollows and behind clumps of rank brambles were large tents, dimly lighted with candles, but looking comfortable. The kind of comfort they supplied was indicated by pairs of men entering and reappearing, bearing litters; by low moans from within and by long rows of dead with covered faces outside. These tents were constantly receiving the wounded, yet were never full; they were continually ejecting the dead, yet were never empty. It was as if the helpless had been carried in and murdered, that they might not hamper those whose business it was to fall to-morrow."

"An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching."