What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? ... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.

It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

...learn from my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own.

How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.

The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.

How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart - to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!