Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

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.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

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.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death