The doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more u… - Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it - by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong.

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.