The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.

For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.

You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

Here's the main page of motivational quotes, if you want a different topic. Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.