Intelligence and proper education will give you independence of spirit.

I knew you would do me good in some way, at some time--I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you.

Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.

They will both be happy, and I do not grudge them their bliss; but I groan under my own misery: some of my suffering is very acute. Truly, I ought not to have been born: they should have smothered me at first cry.

You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read.

God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.