For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear – the city of London and the South Seas.
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
I never fancied broiling fowls; – though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim.
God’s one and only voice is silence.
Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.
The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
If not against us, nature is not for us.
There is a woe that is wisdom, a woe that is madness.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.
We become sad in the first place because we have nothing stirring to do.
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.
Father Mapple uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed to be kneeling at the bottom of the sea.