He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime

Nature has provided for the exigency of privation, by putting the measure of our necessities far below the measure of our wants. Our necessities are to our wants as Falstaff's pennyworth of bread to his any quantity of sack.

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it--to realize it to the full--to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.