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.

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

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.

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.

Wealth is good, and if it comes our way we will take it; but a gentleman does not sell himself for wealth.

Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will NEVER, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.

The great wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late