“Adversity is the first path to truth.”

Who falls from all he knows of bliss, Cares little into what abyss.

Hatred is the madness of the heart.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of the world all things are weighed by the false scale of custom.

The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend.

The art of angling, the cruelest, the coldest and the stupidest of pretended sports.

There is no instinct like that of the heart.

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.

There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.

Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only “like a youth Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth.”

I have not loved the world, nor the world me.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

I awoke one day to find myself famous.

O thou beautiful And unimaginable ether! and Ye multiplying masses of increased And still increasing lights! what are ye? what Is this blue wilderness of interminable Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.

The greatest development is achieved during the first years of life, and therefore it is then that the greatest care should be taken. If this is done, then the child does not become a burden; he will reveal himself as the greatest marvel of nature.

My first encounter with the ocean was on the Jersey Shore when I was three years old and I got knocked over by a wave.

In 1967, I had my first black girlfriend, and a lot more ever since then. I just don’t understand racism.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.

The big problems are where people don’t realise they have one in the first place.