Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.
When I step into the batter’s box, the fans, the noise, the cheers, they all disappear. For that moment, the world is just a battle between me and the pitcher. And more than anything, I want to win.
But her’s was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness.
The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.
From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition.
I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.
My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.
One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought.
The modern masters promise very little.
My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.
All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.
Sorrow only increased with knowledge.
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.
It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.
Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.
There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.
A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer...
My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.