We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.

Every single time you help somebody stand up you are helping humanity rise.

A like may not necessarily mean real impact has been made

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

Wherever we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle and end of everything to us.

The only thing that matters is what happens on the little hump out in the middle of the field.

I haven't seen one guy beat five people yet. It needs to be done collectively.

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

I think it's interesting that people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi said that the Tea Party was dead and they weren't influential and yet they're still talking about the Tea Party.

Love is a capricious creature which desires everything and can be contented with almost nothing.