There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.

Business

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

Critics and Criticism

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.

Failure

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.

Living Together

One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.

Misers and Misery

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

Self-interest

The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

Travel and Tourism

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

Wives

The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.

Writers and Writing

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.