There is a feeling of energy in this accumulation of beauty, a feeling which warms the heart. Your private gallery is a place of hope for those who have faith in man and in his ability not to yield continually to his baser instincts.

I pray that these ordeals pass for you without leaving bitterness in your heart, the only danger we must fear.

Where does the strength of a sovereign really lie? Not in weapons, but in the natural support of his people.

I would prefer to die than to be depressed for depression can hurt you everyday and it'll last for a lifetime while on dying, you can only feel pain the moment you'll die.

It is impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashely explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise. It's the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one's burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don't give two straws if your pudding's been burnt.

It is impossible to live without danger, Ashley explains. The danger is always there, the hazard of wasted lives, of decades bent over a desk, of squalid and lonely deaths in hospital beds. Fools turned their faces away from danger and pretended at immunity, but others went to the fountainhead of life.