Why is youth so short and age so long?

A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.

Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.

The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.

Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.

I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth? --"Wanda