Quotes About Persistence

an eight day clock.

There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!

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?

Y si Ahab abandona de súbito la búsqueda?. Es probable que la pierna inexistente le duela para toda la vida. Moby Dick

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.

Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.

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;

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.

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. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!

Aucun volume gros et durable ne pourra jamais être écrit sur la puce ; bien que beaucoup s'y soient essayés

that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale

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

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

eats the whale by its own light, does

Why, thou monkey, we've been cruising now hard upon three years and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth when thou art up there.

How obvious it is it, too, that this necessity for the whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase.

I tell you, the sperm will stand no nonsense.

Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm, and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when--There she blows!--the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat.

Todavía puedo ver aquella figura, pálidamente pulcra, lastimosamente respetable, incurablemente solitaria. Era Bartleby.

Ama inanç, bir çakal gibi mezar taÅŸlar? aras?nda beslenir ve en canl? umutlar?n? bile bu ölü kuÅŸkulardan devÅŸirir.

I offer the book, relying on the maxim of Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of the Fathers : The work is not yours to finish; but neither are you free to take no part in it.

There are no difficulties that can't be overcome