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.

Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.

The modern masters promise very little

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.

For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to which these sights were the monuments and the remembrances. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.

When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?