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Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

A laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into still subtler form.

Immortality is but ubiquity in time.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately steppint into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!