I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.

It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.

Is not every action of Hamlet induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in revenge alone? And dose it need superhuman efforts to recognize that revenge never can be duty? I say again that Hamlet thinks much, but that he is by no means wise.

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four.

To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?