Never let your love for your profession overshadow your religious feeling. Depend on it that religion will strengthen, not weaken, your energies, and will not only make you a better sailor, but a superior man. Professional studies are not to be neglected; but, on the other hand, take care how you fall into the common error of believing they are the remedy for all the ills of life.

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Do your duty, and don't swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God.

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without leading facts. We have animals for literature, Cabinet Encyclopaedias, Family Libraries, Diffusion Societies, and heaven knows what else! What is all this for? Not to add knowledge to the learned, but to tell points to the ignorant, without giving them the trouble to acquire the links. Oh! it is sad work. And the result will be injurious to all classes.

When a man is no longer anxious to do better than well, he is done for.