It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it--just as the world reproduces itself i...n the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horseshoes, and razor clams, and whatever the sea cas...ts up,--a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature,--inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience; and casts light into the cavern through wh...ich he worked his cause up to the cheerful day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's the use of worrying? It never was worth while,... So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, And smile, smile, smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way ...is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift... and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »