“What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.”

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.

But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

We live as we dream – alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

A feeling deliciously bitter lingers on my tongue. It’s sharp relish urges me to keep my mouth shut and my conscience clear. Though how can one act so when one’s veins are stuffed with what’s not said before?

The success of the Starbucks has been based on this balance between profitability and a social conscience. Everywhere we’re doing business, were trying to manage the business through the lens of humanity.

God desires the smallest degree of purity of conscience in you more than all the works you can perform.

People in Sweden are very conscious of what people are saying about you.

The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction-that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist-and before any science there is first of all belief. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

I’m not really concerned about boundaries. I just follow my conscience and my heart. Follow your heart. That’s what I do. Compassion is something I have a lot of, because I’ve been through a lot of pain in my life. Anybody who has suffered a lot of pain has a lot of compassion.