To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything.
Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.
I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.
A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation.
Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.
Kisses are the remnants of paradise.
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies...
If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything .
I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.
I have been called romantic. Well, that can’t be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change.
The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all.