The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.

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

At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person - all my old friends are gone... & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world.

Once a king ... it was impossible, without risk of life, to sink to a private station.

There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious - painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour - but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being

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.