"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."

"Them that die will be the lucky ones!"

"Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly."

"We must go on, because we can't turn back."

"You can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad."

"Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!"

"They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener."

"What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate."

"Doctors is all swabs... and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that? — and I lived on rum, I tell you."

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

"But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men."

"Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load."

"Wherever a man is, there will be a lie."

"It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation."

"The imagination loves to trifle with what is not."

"Sanity itself is a kind of convention."

"There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear."

"This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories."

"The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities."

"The wine is bottled poetry."

"If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!"

"Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment."

"And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations."

"When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten."

"When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things."

"To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath."

"In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence."

"Time passes quickly with lovers."

"An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man."

"The world is a great place and stocked with wealth and beauty, and there is no limit to the rewards that may be offered. Such an one who would refuse a million of money may sell his honour for an empire or the love of a woman."

"A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour."

"I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion."

"I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful."

"Decisive actions are often taken in a moment and without any conscious deliverance from the rational parts of man."

"There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions."

"A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission."

"Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?"

"A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying."

"Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?"

"People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living."

"The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing."

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

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."

"A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity."

"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life."

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

"There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life."

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life."