Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

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

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.