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

"It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open."

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

"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

"Come what will, one comfort's always left - that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated."

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours - watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it."

"To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment."

"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."

"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."

"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. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

"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 for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras."

"Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

"Thy silence, then that voices thee."

"From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it."

"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, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right."

"Strangest problems of life seem clearing, but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming?"

"At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows."

"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 of life."

"Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness."

"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."

"There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future."

"We are the pioneers of the world, the advance-guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things..."

"It's only his outside, a man can be honest in any sort of skin."

"There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay."

"The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love."

"I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts."

"I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts."

"Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers - ambition and indigestion."

"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 was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe."

"There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man."

"With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart's, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it."

"So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me."

"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 winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore."

"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."

"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 of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair."

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

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

"Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill."

"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."

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

"And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes."

"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 find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."

"At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect."

"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?"

"There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep."

"There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities."

"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."

"Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock."

"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."