Status Updates From Il segreto di Falkner

“Oh, who would rule by power, when so much more absolute a tyranny is established through love!”

“Sympathy is more of a deceiver than conscience. The stander-by may dilate on the force of passion and the power of temptation, but the guilty are not cheated by such subterfuges; he knows that the still voice within was articulate to him. He remembers that at the moment of action he felt his arm checked, his ear warned; he could have stopped, and been innocent.”

“This animal dared revile beings of whose very nature he could form no conception.”

“There are periods in our lives when we seem to run away from ourselves and our afflictions; to commence a new course of existence, upon fresh ground, towards a happier goal. Sometimes, on the contrary, the stream of life doubles—runs back to old scenes, and we are constrained to linger amid the desolation we had hoped to leave far behind.”

“In former days mortals wasted rather life than feeling, and every blow was a physical one; now the heart dies, though the body lives—and a miserable existence is dragged out, after hope and joy have ceased to adorn it.”

She really loves putting people in the most wretched situations huh

“Concord, affection, and sympathy are so delightful, that all that disturbs the harmony is eminently distasteful. Family contentions are worst of all.”

“Yet why, when nature is so full, of joyousness, when, at the summer season, vegetation basks in beauty and delight, and the very clouds seem to enjoy their aerial abode in upper sky, why should misery find a home in the mind of man?”

“In the human heart, and, if observation does not err, more particularly in the heart of man, the passions exert their influence fitfully. With some analogy to the laws which govern the elements, they now sleep in calm, and now arise with the violence of furious winds.”

“We all are apt to think that when we discard a motive we cure a fault, and foster the same error from a new cause with a safe conscience.”