top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Heroism quotes

"Hard times don't create heroes. It is during the hard times when the 'hero' within us is revealed."

"Let your heroes be known. Give praise and honor to those to whom it is rightly due. Spend more time posting stories about heroes than you do about the wrongs in the world. When we know about heroes and we see those who perform heroic acts, we too want to be heroes. There is a hero in all of us. Heroes are important."

"Why?" I asked. He knew what I meant, and shrugged. "Because when the legends get written, I didn't want to be remembered for standing on the sidelines. I want my future offspring to know that I was there, and that I fought against her at the end, even if I couldn't do anything useful." I blinked, this time not at the brightness of the sun. "Because," he went on, his eyes locked with mine, "I didn't want you to fight alone. Or die alone."

"The true hero trains himself in silence."
Explore more quotes by Herman Melville

"To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."

"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."

"Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own."

"There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath..."

"Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?"

"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 of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it."

"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

"Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat."
bottom of page