Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.

Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.

Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.

It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.

It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.