“There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.”

Broken Music; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Variant: So precious life is! Even to the old the hours are as a miser’s coins!

Song lyrics, The Dreaming (1982)

Mrs. Alving, Act II
Ghosts (1881)
Context: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Source: Go Ask Alice

Waiting for the Olympians (p. 255)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 270.

Source: Knowledge of Hell (2008), p. 145

À l'heure, si sombre encore, de la civilisation où nous sommes, le misérable s'appelle L'HOMME; il agonise sous tous les climats, et il gémit dans toutes les langues.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

Source: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2005), p. 25.