Quotes from Herman Melville

But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!

And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way.

Dudas de todas las cosas terrenales e intuiciones de algunas cosas celestiales: esta combinación no produce ni un creyente ni un incrédulo, sino que produce un hombre que las considera a ambas con iguales ojos.

And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.

Hay en ese extraño caos que llamamos la vida algunas circunstancias y momentos absurdos en los cuales tomamos el Universo todo por una inmensa broma pesada, aunque no logremos percibir con claridad en qué consiste su gracia y sospechemos que nosotros mismos somos las víctimas de las burlas.

Tus pensamientos han creado en ti una criatura; y cuando alguien se hace un Prometeo con su intenso pensar, un buitre se alimenta de su corazón para siempre, y ese buitre es la propia cultura que él crea.

Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?

Las cosas más maravillosas son siempre aquellas que no pueden expresarse, los recuerdos más sentidos no dejan epitafios.

Considerad la sutileza del mar; cómo sus más temidas criaturas se deslizan bajo el agua, sin aparecer en su mayor parte, traidoramente ocultas bajo lo más amables matices del azur.

An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.

In this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the 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; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

Hay una sabiduría que es dolor; pero hay un dolor que es locura.

Pela arte foi criado esse grande Leviatã denominado Comunidade ou Estado - (em latim, Civitas) que não é mais que um homem artificial". THOMAS HOBBES. SENTENÇA DE ABERTURA DO "LEVIATÔ.

All sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable- they live in the varying outer weather and they inhale it's fickleness

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with

This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, A Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.

His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity, whensoever possible, with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.

si bien el hombre ama a su prójimo, es un animal que también ama el dinero y esta tendencia interfiere muchas veces con su benevolencia

No quiero a ningún hombre en mi barco que no tenga miedo de la ballena», decía Starbuck. Con esto parecía insinuar no sólo que el valor más seguro y más útil es el que surge de una justa estimación del peligro que se afronta, sino también que un hombre que ignora el miedo es compañero mucho más riesgoso que un cobarde. —Sí

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.

1.-Un pez atado pertenece a quien lo ató. 2.-Un pez suelto es presa para cualquiera que lo atrape.