The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.

The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.

For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.

There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.