There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.