A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day – very much such a sweetness as this – I struck my first whale – a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty – forty – forty years ago! – ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and...

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking...

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies...

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. (moby dick chap 29 p123)

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 this green, gentle , and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not...

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 foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab....

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 funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong...

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 by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God...

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 model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without...

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 him, that mortal man cannot be true– not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men...

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 sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition...

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 the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the...

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 glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous,...

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. That captain was Ahab.

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 to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain.I believe that this wise and...

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 their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at...

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.