All the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
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 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 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 gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
