“Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.”

“Good-bye -- if you hear of my being stood up against a stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs.”

“Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.”

“The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle")”

“Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.”

“So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of the potter's field I shall soon have both. What wealth!”

“I was born to poor because of honest parents.”