So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences. Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate. All human beings are commingled out of good and evil. An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding. By the time a man gets into the seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle. In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Every one lives by selling something. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. |