It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]

I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor...

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up,...

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on...

The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.

In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes...

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral...

The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the takingit away from those who have a different complexion or slightlyflatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you lookinto it too much. What...

A estrada seria longa. Todas as estradas que levam ao que o nosso coração almeja são longas

You revolutionists’ the other continued, with leisurely self-confidence, ‘are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence...

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

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.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done...

The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line…To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life...

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...

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little —...

The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants’ soul.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures...

I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the...

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the...

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that...

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be...

O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (…) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret – as you would think of some one dead you...

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in...

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive – survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove!...

For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all...

Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop...

Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled...

Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last–only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for...

And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank

I — I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.’ But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was...

Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence–but more generally takes the form of apathy

Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work...