Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
To think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
