Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.