One should never be ashamed to cry. Tears are rain on the dust of earth.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

Time has been lost and opportunity thrown away, but I am yet a young man, and may retrieve it.

‎And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire.

No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die.

There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.