The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.

You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.