“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”

“I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.”

“Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.”

“To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”

“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”