if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness. - Mary Wollstonecraft

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!

But now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood.

learn from my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own.