“All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.”

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.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force–nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.