To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.