“Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.”

We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it — I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.

I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.

The sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities – courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.

Don’t get upset with little problems because life is like a road and problems are like speed breakers, they save us from big accidents.

There is an ambush everywhere from the army of accidents; therefore the rider of life runs with loosened reins.

By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and a Hindu only by accident of birth.

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

You weren’t an accident. You weren’t mass produced. You aren’t an assembly-line product. You were deliberately planned, specifically gifted, and lovingly positioned on the earth by the Master Craftsman.

A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.

Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke.

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.