In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Life is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the principle of evil, hand to hand, foot to foot. Every inch of the way is disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening.

Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

Christ, if he had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer

Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.