Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.