To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a se… - Nathaniel Hawthorne

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Clergymen, judges, statesmen — the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day — stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.