Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
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.
You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.