"Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt..." - Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“We are all happy if we but knew it.”

“I sometimes think love consists precisely of the voluntary gift by the loved object of the right to tyrannize over it.”

“Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself.”

“Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.”

“There are the terrible ones who carry about in themselves the beast of prey, and have no choice except lusts or self-laceration. And even their lusts are self-laceration.”

“A dying man can do nothing easy.”

“The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.”

“I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.”

“The reason why most women have so little sense of friendship is that this is but a cold and flat passion to those that have felt that of love.”