People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.
To the young man a kind of worship of some power outside himself is essential. one has strength and enthusiasm and wants gods to worship.
Here and there a man respected the operator. Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.
Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved.
We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.
One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.
I don’t know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.
To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.
I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling refreshed.
Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.
I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.
You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty.
The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.
You must try to forget all you have learned,’ said the old man. ‘You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.
She is always pretending she loves me, but look at her now. Am I in her thoughts? Is there a tender look in her eyes? Is she dreaming of me as she walks along the streets?
Wait and wait. Most people’s lives are spent waiting.
Most of us live our lives like toads, sitting perfectly still, under a plantain leaf. We are waiting for a fly to come our way. When it comes out darts the tongue. We nab it.That is all. We eat it.
Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.
What is to be got at to make the air sweet the ground good under the feet can only be got at by failure trial again and again and again failure.
Interest in the lives of others the high evaluation of these lives what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself the value he attributes to his own being?
If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders how is all life to become important to him?
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass make love work when they have to bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
General Grant had a simple childlike recipe for meeting life … “I am terribly afraid but the other fellow is afraid too.”
Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.