If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

If it comes to a swinging, swing all, say I.

Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned.