God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.

In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary?

It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.

Genius is full of trash.

The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.

From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space.