Am I going home to idleness? No, no. My feet and hands may be still, not so the mind--that has its aspirations yet, and it will work, for it has a law unto itself. Idleness is one thing, doing is another.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

I know what I should love to do--to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing--one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.

One is never more on trial than in the moment of excessive good fortune.