Flora Hope

“...a man cannot be held to write down in cold blood the wild and black thoughts that storm his brain when an uncontrollable passion has battered a breach for them. He is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in giving thanks that power to resist was vouchsafed to him, than in fretting over wicked impulses which come unsought and extort an unwilling hospitality from the weakness of our nature.”
― Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

“Swante Taggart had never thought of himself as a 'brave' man. The very word made him restless and irritable . . . as if men could be divided into the brave and the cowardly, as if brave men were always brave and the cowards always cowardly. It simply wasn't that way. A man did what he had to do.”
― Louis L'amour, Taggart

“Oh! what a poor thing is human life in is best enjoyments! subjected to imaginary evils, when it has no real ones to disturb it; and that can be made as effectually unhappy by its apprehensions of remote contingencies, as if it was struggling with the pangs of a present distress!”
― Samuel Richardson, Pamela

“It is the observation of some antient Sage, whose name I have forgot, that passions operate differently on the human mind, as disease on the body, in proportion to the strength or weakness, soundness or rottenness of the one and the other.”
― Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews