To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.
Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.
If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.
Once I guessed right, And I got credit by’t; Thrice I guessed wrong, And I kept my credit on.
Youth is wholly experimental.
A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.
The very flexibility and ease which make men’s friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.
Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.
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!
The secret to a happiness is a small ego. And a big wallet. Good wine helps, too. But that’s not really a secret, is it?
This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
We must go on, because we can’t turn back.
That was Flint’s treasure that we had come so far to seek, and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the ammassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.
Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.
I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break.
There is a romance about all those who are abroad in the black hours.
That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.
Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.