Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword
To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.
The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.