Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas