“What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field.”

“...for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall. ”

“To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.”

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”

“For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon thieves....So every bit of brisk living, and above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomachs, when he cries stand and deliver. --An Inland Voyage”

“This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.”

“The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties.Help us to play the man,Help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces,Let cheerfulness abound with industry.Give us to go blithely on our business all this day,Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured,And grant us in the end the gift of sleep.”