Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.

The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.

You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in.

Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup.