Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those...
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 what is spoken.
His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanis...
I am not sure whether he's sane.-If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.
There is but one art to omit.
You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish and if that be so why not now and where you stand?
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.
The captain has said too much or he has said too little, and I'm bound to say that I require an explanation of his words.
Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.
If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!
If he be Mr. Hyde he had thought, I shall be Mr. Seek.
Ethics are my veiled mistress; I love them, but know not what they are.
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.
Anyone can carry his burden however hard until nightfall. Anyone can do his work however hard for one day. Anyone can live sweetly patiently lovingly purely till the sun goes down. And this is...
An aspiration is a joy forever a possession as solid as a landed estate a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.
It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink With little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place.