History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
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.
Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.