Quotes from Herman Melville

Lulled into such an opium-like state of listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of the waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.

What will the owners say, sir?" "Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

may not be able

moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

remains a part of the universal problem of all things.

Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses.

Lorsque les pirogues regagnèrent le navire, leur chasse terminée, les Blancs virent qu'il était tombé aux mains meurtrières des sauvages qui faisaient partie de l'équipage.

For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.

if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor

I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy

No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat;

Ci ho pensato fin ora e questo «Ah,ah» è la conclusione. Perché? Perché una risata è la risposta più saggia e più naturale a tutto ciò che è strambo, e venga quel che vuole, ci resta sempre una consolazione: la consolazione infallibile che tutto è prestabilito.

No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying.

I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.

He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations

Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!

Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the

Y si uno es un filósofo, aunque esté sentado en una lancha ballenera no sentirá un ápice más de terror que sentado ante el fuego del anochecer, con un atizador y no un arpón al lado.

Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.

Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir.

Die Wahrheit, dass alles tiefe, ernsthafte Denken nur das unerschrockene Streben der Menschenseele ist, sich die hohe Freiheit ihrer Meere zu bewahren; dieweil die wildesten Winde zwischen Himmel und Erde sich verschworen haben, uns an der elenden Knechtschaft der Küste scheitern zu lassen.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.