“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.”

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.

We were made for more than compromise. We were made for God’s promises in every area of our lives.

My goal should never be to raise kids that make me look good. (Oh but how my flesh craves this!) My goal should be to raise kids who love God and spend their lives making His goodness known in their corner of the world.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

It is good to live and learn.

Healing and the resentment cannot live in the same body. One must suffocate to let the other survive.

All of us can attain to Christian virtue and holiness, no matter in what condition of life we live and no matter what our life work may be.

When the words come, they are merely empty shells without the music. They live as they are sung, for the words are the body and the music the spirit.