Everything must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.

I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.

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

I am not a person of opinions because I feel the counter arguments too strongly.

My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.