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

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.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

The bottom line for Republicans is this: The United States can have an open door without having open borders, but we cannot preserve the country we love by slamming that door in the faces of those who most aspire to join our nation.

Your desire for involvement with the world of means when Allah has withdrawn you from it is a fall from high aspiration.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

I think it’s important that we remind everybody that America was never great in itself. It’s been great in its aspirations.

I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief.

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.