I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.

It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.

The public is a bad guesser.

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.