“Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source.”

If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself…that a tiger is an optical illusion–well, he will find out he is wrong.

Absence – that common cure of love.

Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.

And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music… Speak to me!

If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

Adversity is the first path to truth.

The great object of life is Sensation – to feel that we exist – even though in pain – it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming – to battle – to travel – to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.

The drying up a single tear has more, of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Come what may, I have been blest.

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter.

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms.

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

The angels are as perfect in form as they are in spirit.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.