Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.

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

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.