“We can never cease to be ourselves.”

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement – but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

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.