"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love."
"And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame."
"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?"
"The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye."
"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."
"Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine."