Victory quotes

… way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue and for the matter of that, even in love.

Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.

The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.

Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.

The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.

But I wouldn’t be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I have always liked him. The flesh and blood individual who stands behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a mysterious Swede right enough.

There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds.

It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as “black diamonds.” Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal.

The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.

First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation.

These are very unnatural physics, but they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which we “out there” used to laugh among ourselves—but not inimically. An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely worth derision.

He was out of everybody’s way, as if he were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island.

An island is but the top of a mountain.

Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which embrace the continents of this globe.

Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents—paid for by Heyst—he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere water-drinker ever attained:

“Heyst’s a puffect g’n’lman. Puffect! But he’s a ut-uto-utopist.”

Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point was his invitation to old McNab himself.

“Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my prayer. But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry; and it suddenly struck me: ‘What if it’s the Devil who has sent him?’ ”

“I have no connection with the supernatural,” said Heyst graciously, moving on. “Nobody has sent me. I just happened along.”

“I know better,” contradicted Morrison. “I may be unworthy, but I have been heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer—”

Naive Heyst! As if anybody would … Nobody amongst us had any interest in men who went home. They were all right; they did not count any more.

Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to Heaven.

It removed a man from the world of hazard and adventure.

To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering, drifting, unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that can furnish a house was startlingly novel. It was grotesquely fantastic.

It was like a bird owning real property.

“Belongings? Do you mean chairs and tables?” Davidson asked with unconcealed astonishment.

He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:

“The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I think that here we can safely defy the fates.”

When relating all this to me, Davidson’s only comment was:

When relating all this to me, Davidson’s only comment was:

“Funny notion of defying the fates⁠—to take a woman in tow!”

He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour.

The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.

One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger or fear.

Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final “All right,” steadied her.

“I am not rich enough to buy you out,” he went on, speaking with an extraordinary detached grin, “even if it were to be done; but I can always steal you.”

She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and very complicated meaning.

accustoming his mind to the contemplation of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear praiseworthy and wise.

For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.

He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action big with incalculable consequences. And then he asked himself if the girl had understood what he meant. Who could tell? He was assailed by all sorts of doubts.

Why, I could face him myself now that I know you care for me. A girl can always put up a fight. You believe me? Only it isn’t easy to stand up for yourself when you feel there’s nothing and nobody at your back.

There’s nothing so lonely in the world as a girl who has got to look after herself.

When I left poor dad in that home—it was in the country, near a village—I came out of the gates with seven shillings and threepence in my old purse, and my railway ticket. I tramped a mile, and got into a train—”

“Don’t let it trouble you,” Heyst said.

“Your voice is enough. I am in love with it, whatever it says.”

She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this quiet statement.

“I thought we were being observed.

A smile is the best of masks.

Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us—watching you, at least. That’s why I asked you to smile.”

Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost.

It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world.

Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father’s analysis had blown away from the son.

Her shrinking form, her downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations.

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

It’s easy to imagine Schomberg’s humiliation, his shocked fury, when he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under his nose by “that Swede,” apparently without any trouble worth speaking of.

but when he opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for Schomberg’s nerves. The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on the hotelkeeper (and this was most frightful), without any definite expression, seemed to dissolve the last grain of resolution in his character.

“You don’t think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary people, do you?”

inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.

Nothing strange in seeing drift-logs off a coast like that; and I’m hanged if the skipper didn’t make one out in the wake of the moon.

Strange what a little thing a man’s life hangs on sometimes⁠—a single word!

Here you are, sitting unsuspicious before me, and you may let out something unbeknown to you that would settle your hash. Not that I have any ill-feeling. I have no feelings. If the skipper had said, ‘Oh, bosh!’

“Work be damned!

I ain’t a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone; I am a man who’s following a gentleman.

There’s a difference which you will never understand, Mr. Tame Schomberg.”

He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that this primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed.

The oldest voice in the world is just the one that never ceases to speak.

If anybody could have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst’s father, with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he could not.

There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who, as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould, started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which he was so soon to lose.

Action⁠—the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth! The barbed hook, baited with the illusion of progress, to bring out of the lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!

“And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest fish of them all,” Heyst said to himself.

“

Look on⁠—make no sound,

” were the last words of the man who had spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which had filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.

“And then I won’t be any good,” she added with conviction. “That I won’t!

I can only be what you think I am.

”

Mistake, no doubt. There is something of my father in every man who lives long enough. But they don’t say anything. They can’t. They wouldn’t know how, or perhaps, they wouldn’t speak if they could.

Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation.

However, that particular man died as quietly as a child goes to sleep. But, after listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to fight there. I started off to wander about, an independent spectator—if that is possible.”

I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don’t know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that friendship? I am not sure what it was.

I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.

”

And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn’t, well—I don’t know what I could have done to stop him. In one way or another I should have had to be loyal.

Truth, work, ambition, love itself, may be only counters in the lamentable or despicable game of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game.

No, the shade of Morrison needn’t haunt me. What’s the matter? I say, Lena, why are you staring like that? Do you feel ill?”

For Ricardo was sincere in his indignation before the elementary principle of loyalty to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a patient duplicity of years.

There are standards in villainy as in virtue, and the act as he pictured it to himself acquired an additional horror from the slow pace of that treachery so atrocious and so tame.

But he understood too the educated judgment of his governor, a gentleman looking on all this with the privileged detachment of a cultivated mind, of an elevated personality.

“

What did you think a fellow is, sir⁠—a baby?

” he said, in answer to Mr. Jones’s objections. “I am trying to find out what I would do myself. He wouldn’t be likely to be cleverer than I am.”

So far, somehow, this had come about of itself. Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious effort and forced her stiff, cold lips into a smile.

Duplicity⁠—the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed, too!

Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence and a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world.

“

A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.

I have never been diplomatic in my relation with mankind—not from regard for its feelings, but from a certain regard for my own. Diplomacy doesn’t go well with consistent contempt. I cared little for life and still less for death.”

“A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it. I have never been diplomatic in my relation with mankind—not from regard for its feelings, but from a certain regard for my own.

Diplomacy doesn’t go well with consistent contempt.

I cared little for life and still less for death.”

I have managed to refine everything away. I’ve said to the Earth that bore me: ‘I am I and you are a shadow.’ And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words cannot be uttered with impunity.

Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades!

How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost all belief in realities … Lena, give me your hand.”

And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them?

I have lost all belief in realities⁠ ⁠… Lena, give me your hand.

”

“Do I? Ah! That’s it. I don’t know how to talk. I have managed to refine everything away.

I’ve said to the Earth that bore me: ‘I am I and you are a shadow.’ And, by Jove, it is so!

But it appears that such words cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them?

but even there we could not remain very long. And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin with. Ants have been at work there—ants after the men. A deathtrap, at best.

One can die but once, but there are many manners of death.

”

Two candles were burning on the stand-up desk. Mr. Jones, tightly enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown, kept his elbows close against his sides and his hands deeply plunged into the extraordinarily deep pockets of the garment. The costume accentuated his emaciation.

He resembled a painted pole leaning against the edge of the desk, with a dried head of dubious distinction stuck on the top of it.

Ricardo lounged in the doorway. Indifferent, in appearance, to what was going on, he was biding his time. At a given moment, between two flickers of lightning, he melted out of his frame into the outer air.

“I dislike violence and ferocity of every sort as much as you do,” Mr. Jones declared, looking very languid as he leaned against the wall, but speaking fairly loud. “You can ask my Martin if it is not so.

This, Mr. Heyst, is a soft age. It is also an age without prejudices.

I’ve heard that you are free from them yourself. You mustn’t be shocked if I tell you plainly that we are after your money—or I am, if you prefer to make me alone responsible.

“

He who deliberates is lost,

” said Heyst with grave mockery.