A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.

Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. "I would prefer not to quit you", he replied, gently emphasizing the not.

If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.

Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.

Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.