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

We can never cease to be ourselves.

A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.

God is for men, and religion for women.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.

Everything belonged to him–but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

To be in the association of those aspiring to love God is the ultimate gift of God.

In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.

Divine desperateness is the beginning of spiritual awakening because it gives rise to the aspiration for God-realisation.

The inside must be made entirely calm and quiet and there should reign an upward aspiration – a state of awaiting.

Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.

You need not aspire for or get any new state. Get rid of your present thoughts, that is all.

There is evil in the world, but it can be overcome through repentance ­and aspiration, and therein lies the true meaning and adventure of life.

Elite is not a bad word, it’s an aspirational one.