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

Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.

The sky aft was dark as pitch, but the moon still shone brightly ahead of us and lit up the blackness. Beneath its sheen a huge white-topped breaker, twenty feet high or more, was rushing on to us. It was on the break-the moon shone on its crest and tipped its foam with light. On it rushed beneath the inky sky, driven by the awful squall behind it.

The law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money.

We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.

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.

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!