“There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.”

“I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.”

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”

“We must take things as we find them in this world.”

“First get the facts, you can distort them later”

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”

“At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen.”