The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

A happy life is impos­si­ble; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.

What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.

Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.