Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.

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

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.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.