“What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!”

“I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.”

“All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.”

“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!”

“My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”

“And fearless minds climb soonest unto crowns.”

“Some falls the means are happier to rise.”

“Many strokes, though with a little axe, hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak.”

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.”

“All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.”

“Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.”

“Don't give your son money. As far as you can afford it, give him horses.”

“It saves a lot of trouble if, instead of having to earn money and save it, you can just go and borrow it.”

“Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.”

“Is this the generation of love? Hot blood, hot thoughts and hot deeds? Why, they are vipers. Is love a generation of vipers?”

“The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.”

“Fire that's closest kept burns most of all.”

“Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work.”

“Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.”

“Working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation.”

“Now, my masters, happy man be his dole, say I; every man to his business.”

“No profit grows where no pleasure is taken.”

“Why, universal plodding poisons up The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long-during action tires The sinewy vigor of the traveller.”