"For thirty years," he said, "I’ve sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them's my views——amen, so be it."

"In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day."

"A child should always say what's true And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table; At least as far as he is able."

"Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by. Late in the night when the fires are out, Why does he gallop and gallop about?"

"I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed."

"The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart."

"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

"Children, you are very little, And your bones are very brittle."

"They were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are: being men rooted out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss together on the rough seas, with masters no less cruel."

"Each side, in these sort of civil broils, takes the name of honesty for its own."

"Am I no a bonny fighter?"

"I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first."

"I've a grand memory for forgetting, David."

"Of all my verse, like not a single line; But like my title, for it is not mine. That title from a better man I stole: Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!"

"Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!"

"Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl."

"Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair Who glory to have thrown in air, High over arm, the trembling reed, By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed."

"Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill."

"Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain"

"My body which my dungeon is, And yet my parks and palaces: — Which is so great that there I go All the day long to and fro."

"There's just ae thing I cannae bear, An' that's my conscience."

"'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.'"

"It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity."

"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name."

"It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it."

"Man is not truly one, but truly two."

"The doom and burthen 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."

"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil."

"Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed."

"Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers."

"I have observed there are no persons so far away as those who are both married and estranged, so that they seem out of ear-shot or to have no common tongue."

"Thus in the best fabric of duplicity, there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all."

"It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken."

"Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian."

"Hatred betrayed is hatred impotent."

"When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war."

"There are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles."

"The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action."

"We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented."

"To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. 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."

"Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties."

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people."

"Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed."

"To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto."

"Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me."

"The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night."