A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.

What I'd like to be above all is a writer.

When the mind once allows a doubt to gain entrance, the value of deeds performed grow less, their character changes, we forget the past and dread the future.

Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.

As long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.

On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!

[we see that] science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.