"Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind."

"... In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the
irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an over-powering
awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of
existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound
to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all
eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all
care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the
common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by
the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast
breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is
concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what
of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares
nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of
darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true
initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful
encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom and charity
are born; and with their birth a new life begins."