It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one’s uses.
There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.
There was a patient look on the old man’s face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.
It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.
Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.
My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew, who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways.
Yes’m, old friends is always best, ’less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
Some set more by such things as come from a distance, but I rec’lect mother always used to maintain that folks was meant to be doctored with the stuff that grew right about ’em.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.
Do not hurry too fast in these early winter days, – a quiet hour is worth more to you than anything you can do in it.
Imagination is the only true thing in the world!
What’s everybody’s business is nobody’s business...
Who was it said that you never get to a place until a day after you come, nor leave it until a day after you go?
Don’t scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!
Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way-you will have to make a way of your own.
A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author’s doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.
Love isn’t blind; it’s only love that sees!