Passion is like the lightning, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas it blinds!

Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!

As for the girl, since she is well favoured, she shall brew the king's beer, and be numbered amongst the king's wives-unless, indeed, he is pleased to give her to me.

The food that memory gives to eat is bitter to the taste, and it is only with the teeth of hope that we can bear to bite it.

Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.

The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.