"Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life, and if Virtue is not its own reward, I don't know any other stipend annexed to it"
"What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence"
"There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more"
"There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?"
"The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch"
"You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love"
"To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain"
"When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books"
