All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.