“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.”

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

“A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.”

“There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.”