The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation. - Joseph Conrad

A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.