Rash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.

Everyone is deceived in his hopes, cheated in his expectations.

If it is the greatest truth that you seek, the plants can direct you.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.

In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves.