His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!

Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.