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

He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

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

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.

The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.