The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.

When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that.

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.