“It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.”

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.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

It’s a good thing God chose me before I was born, because he surely would not have afterwards.

I love what I do. I have an insatiable appetite for creating things and wanting to get better at what I do and always growing and never stopping. I don’t know. It’s something I was born with. It’s definitely a drive. It’s a passion, and it’s driven for a love for what I do.

When they tell you to go back to where you come from, tell them proudly that this is where you come from.

My family always helped me. I had people around me who always pushed me to be the best: my dad, my mum. My dad used to play and coach as well. But I wasn’t born with shiny things.

I was born early, along with my twin, and a lot of times, for infants, that can lead to learning delays.

If you look at Cuba what’s the benefit in being in Cuba? Really? It’s almost like being in prison. You can’t think. You can’t have your own opinions. You have no opportunity. You just gotta live life the way you were born into it.

We wept when we were born though all around us smiled; so shall we smile when we die while all around us weep.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.