"The great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open."

"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 being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own."

"Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."

"Flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home."

"Genius is full of trash."

"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 does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I."

"The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up-flaked up, with rose-water snow."

"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."

"But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound."

"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."

"The most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril."

"There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid."

"So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. they err who would assert that invariable this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. An when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bides the soul be rid of it."

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

"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."

"Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things."

"They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure."

"I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty."

"You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world."

"I would prefer not to."

"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."

"Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise."

"Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order."

"He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea."

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke."

"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."

"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 blessed frame of mind would have continued with me, had it not been for the unsolicited and uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me by my professional friends who visited the rooms. But thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous."

"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."

"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 telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds."

"Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness."

"The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed."

"Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity."

"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."

"Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan."

"For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books."

"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."

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

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

"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."

"Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?"

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

"Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land."

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

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

"Truth is in things, and not in words."

"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges."

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

"At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang."

"But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all."