When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation... when I consider all this... I am silent.

One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.

When she sees the leaves fall, they raise no other idea in her mind than that winter is approaching.

Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.

It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.

I have learned much from disease which life could have never taught me anywhere else.

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.