The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world...

Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.

…the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open…

I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale....

At last I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is...

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor

[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do...

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things…

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high...

Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in...

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the...

Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a...

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty.

As minhas primeiras emoções tinham sido a melancolia mais pura e a compaixão mais sincera, mas na mesma proporção em que o desamparo de Bartleby crescia na minha fantasia, aquela melancolia se transformava em medo,...

Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness

But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.

So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not....

Aye, aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he’s chasing ME now; not I, HIM–that’s bad

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils...

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

…for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach...

War yet shall be, but warriors are now operatives; war’s made less grand than peace.

You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic – especially toward the Fourth of July.

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable...

Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that… I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical...

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding,...

The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough...

But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other...

So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer...

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest...

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus...

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus,...