"I am a man of the world, and have seen much of its evil. I have also seen something of its good. But I have never seen anything so good as a good wife."

"I have a profound conviction that the world is a species of gigantic jest—a jest of the most elaborate and stupendous—of the most complicated and august—and of the most utterly incomprehensible charac…"

"He [Longfellow] was guilty of 'the most barbarous class of literary robbery.'"

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human progress is an illusion, that man is not an animal that can be perfected, but an animal that can be improved."

"It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity o…"