It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.
It is not down on any map; true places never are.
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.
As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
I try all things, I achieve what I can.
I would prefer not to.
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
...and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
Call me Ishmael.
Ignorance is the parent of fear.
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
...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.
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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.
Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing.
Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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.
In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
Truth is in things, and not in words.
I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.
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 am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself
We cannibals must help these Christians.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free.
There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.
Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; 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 God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.
Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.
Genius is full of trash.
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.
Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.
My body is but the lees of my better being.
All mortal greatness is but disease.
Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!
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?
Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil?
[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
...hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling...
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.
Ah, Humanity
You cannot hide the soul.
Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
And tell him to paint me a sign, with-"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;" might as well kill both birds at once.
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.
I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
There is all the different in the world between paying and being paid.
All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.
At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand; and never slept so sound before
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs
Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
Will you, or will you not, quit me?' I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. 'I would prefer not to quit you', he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,' was his mildly cadaverous reply.
There she blows!-there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!
To be hated cordially is only a left-handed compliment
But Captain Vere was now again motionless, standing absorbed in thought. Again starting, he vehemently exclaimed, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet that angel must hang!
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
...what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
For there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...
And yet a child’s utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.
Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?
And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.
Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.
There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.
Art is the objectification of feeling
