Quotes from Herman Melville

See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? 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.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:— Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eyes!— Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings

You have but noted his fair cheek. A man-trap may be under his fine ruddy-tipped daisies.

There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.

If in some cases a bit of a nautical Murat in setting forth his person ashore, the Handsome Sailor of the period in question evinced nothing of the dandified Billy-be-Dam, an amusing character all but extinct now, but occasionally to be encountered, and in a form yet more amusing than the original, at the tiller of the boats on the tempestuous Erie Canal or, more likely, vaporing in the groggeries along the towpath.

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.

True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.

habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.

All dies! and not alone The aspiring trees and men and grass; The poets' forms of beauty pass, And noblest deeds they are undone, Even truth itself decays, and lo, From truth's sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.

And the great White Whale sped away. And the sea rolled on as it had been rolling for five thousand years . . .

Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is - by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect.

Bajo el sombrero gacho una lágrima cayó al mar desde los ojos de Ahab; el Pacífico nunca contuvo tanta riqueza como esa única gota de dolor.

go on a whaling voyage; this

For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected.

At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigious hearty breakfast of chowder of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod , sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.

Ale pomni posádko moje, že na pravoboku každi?ké bÄ›dy leží skute?ná radost, a tato radost je mnohem vyÅ¡Å¡í, než kam sahá hloubka strasti.

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.

That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.