“Too much is written by the men who can’t write about the men who do write.”

The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.

Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.

In a saturated population life is always cheap.

Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

Everything is good as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death’s horses they run in span.

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

But I am I. And I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind

A man with a club is a law-maker.

Not all the monsters have fangs.

Some sorts of truth are truer than others.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough, That sometime grew within this learned man. Faustus is gone.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

Man belongs wherever he wants to go – and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.

Every man ought to be in love a few times in his life, and to have a smart attack of the fever. You are better for it when it is over: the better for your misfortune, if you endure it with a manly heart; how much the better for success, if you win it and a good wife into the bargain!

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

There is nothing that making men rich and strong but that which they carry inside of them. True wealth is of the heart, not of the hand.

Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.