"My dreams were at first replete with the terrible circumstances of my creation and murder."

"A truce to philosophy! —Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread."

"Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish."

"The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality."

"Did God create man, merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating nature?"