The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head--no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.

He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.

Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after.

When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the "big canoe" of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.

When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

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

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.