Quote collection
278 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world."
"One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being."
"Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."
"Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy"
"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."
"It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance."
"The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks."
"The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face."
"That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with."
"Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest."
"It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all."
"A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale."
"The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land."
"God is for men, and religion for women."
"It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility."
"We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday."
"Going home must be like going to render an account."
"Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out"."
"This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still."
"Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon."