Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, un-travelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.