monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.

You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.

It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance.

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.

Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.

The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.

An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.