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

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

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason.

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.

Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live.

Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears?

Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.