“Human beings -- human children especially -- seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consist only in a capacity to make others wretched”

“The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.”

“Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.”

“My reader, I know, is one who would not thank me for an elaborate reproduction of poetic first impressions; and it is well, inasmuch as I had neither time nor mood to cherish such; arriving as I did late, on a dark, raw, and rainy evening, in a Babylon and a wilderness, of which the vastness and the strangeness tried to the utmost any powers of clear thought and steady self-possession with which, in the absence of more brilliant faculties, Nature might have gifted me.”

“It was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquility was no more.”

“Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity had not yet found the key.”

“Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world.”