Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.