From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
Ignorance is the parent of fear.
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic – especially toward the Fourth of July.
Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.
Thou hast but enraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.
Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.
He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants.
But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do – remember that – and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
Where the deepest word ends, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.
I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.