Quotes from Herman Melville

of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the

What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?

I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night? Oars! oars Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark; I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men!

It's not down in any map; true places never are.

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.

Nic nie istnieje samo w sobie. Je?eli si? ?udzicie, ?e poczucie wygody ogarnia ca?? wasza istot? i ?e stan taki trwa od d?u?szego czasu, wtedy nie mo?na ju? o was powiedzie?, ?e jest wam wygodnie. - Ismael, Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear?

If man will strike, strike through the mask!

Such is the summary style in which the Typees convert perverse-minded and rebellious hogs into the most docile and amiable pork; a morsel of which placed on the tongue melts like a soft smile from the lips of Beauty.

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.

As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.

There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!

week days pent up in lath and

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.

Ten Å›wiat jest wspólny, jest spóÅ'kÄ… akcyjnÄ… wszystkich ludzi pod ka?dÄ… szerokoÅ›ciÄ… geograficznÄ…. My kanibale, musimy jakoÅ› dopomaga? tym chrzeÅ›cijanom. - Ismael, Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But the same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer, sir—queer, queer, very queer.

So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.

Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it;

the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

En el interior afectaban el alma, especialmente cuando llegaban las horas calladas y suaves del ocaso; entonces, la memoria formaba sus cristales igual que el claro hielo suele formarse de crepúsculo sin ruido.

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.