“What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scicpio. "And what for do you look so black at me?""No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?”

“When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!”

“...happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release...”

“The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”

“Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it.”

“...the holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward.”

“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!”