There is an aesthetics in all things.
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense.
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent.
Because a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left – that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated.
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other;.
Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.
Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when-There she blows!-the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.
Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.
A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.
But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth – pagans and all included – can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? – to do the will of God – that is worship. And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me – that is the will of God.
We know not what we do when we hate.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity.
I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.
Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face-at least to my taste-his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.
Morning to ye! Morning to ye!
Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive aft.
I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure.