Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Hast seen the white whale?
So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.
I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
Delight is to him – a far, far upward, and inward delight – who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
They tell me sir, that Stubb did once desert poor Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye sir, as Stubb did him.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me...
Some certain significance lurk in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
What he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.
Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.
I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God?
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.
I would be as free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.
Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connections?
What could be more full of meaning? – for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest come in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.
He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.