A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

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

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.