Quotes About Determination

My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.

The most ignorant woman can become a great actress, under the stress of emotion.

There are two ways to get to the top of a giant oak tree. You can sit on an acorn and wait. Or you can climb it.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.

Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

blow your trump— blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!

I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all 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...

it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.

There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh

Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!

Give him a good ducking, anyhow. -But he'd crawl back. Duck him again; and keep ducking him. -Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes, and drown you—what then?

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.

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.

Oh, won't ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm?

What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye!

that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale

What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad -- Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! - Capt. Ahab.

There is scarcely anything when a man is in difficulties that he is more disposed to look upon with abhorrence than a rightabout retrograde movement—a systematic going over of the already trodden ground: and especially if he has a love of adventure, such a course appears indescribably repulsive, so long as there remains the least hope to be derived from braving untried difficulties. It

eats the whale by its own light, does

Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.