The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.

Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head

The easiest way of life is the best.

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper.

I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.