Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

The sea -- this truth must be confessed -- has no generosity. No display of manly qualities -- courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness -- has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

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.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.

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

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

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