It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men.

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.