I would prefer not to.

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure….. Consider all this; and then turn to...

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his...

Genius is full of trash.

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...

All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.

Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but...

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

…then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and...

The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in...

They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People’s Business.

Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between–Is my journey’s end coming?

Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant, I act under orders.

At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ was his mildly cadaverous reply.

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the...

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

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see...

Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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...