I have found words [in the Bible] for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my feebleness.

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

I love being superior to myself better than [to] my equals.

I know the Bible is inspired because it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book.

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.