Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

There are no impossible obstacles; there are just stronger and weaker wills, that’s all!

As long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.

The wisest man may be a blind father.

Everything is possible for an eccentric, especially when he is English.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed

And whichsoever way thou goest, may fortune follow.