My own mind began to grow, watchful with anxoius thoughts.

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.

Unhappy man! Do you share my maddness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.

After days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life. Nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

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.

One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought