A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement – but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.
Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.
All a man can betray is his conscience.
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.
Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
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.
It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more.
There is a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride, beyond mere skill, almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art – which is art.
You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come and wait for the turn of the tide.
The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don’t fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.
The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.
A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.
I can’t imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.
Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.