Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. . . . It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.