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Quotes About Death

if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?" "Give him a good ducking, anyhow.
~ Herman Melville
Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.
~ Herman Melville
Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses.
~ Herman Melville
Podéis captar la expresión de ese cachalote, allí? Es la misma con que murió, sólo que algunas de las más largas arrugas de la frente ahora se diría que se han borrado. Me parece que esta ancha frente está llena de una placidez de dehesa, nacida de una indiferencia filosófica hacia la muerte.
~ Herman Melville
Then, if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun!
~ Herman Melville
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.
~ Herman Melville
Como si el hombre, cuanto más tiempo vinculado a la vida, menos quisiera tener que ver con nada que se parezca a la muerte.
~ Herman Melville
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with
~ Herman Melville
gemideki herkes son derece iyi insanlard?. K?sa yaÅŸayan, neÅŸeli ölen türden.
~ Herman Melville
Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! 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.
~ Herman Melville
Me parece que hemos confundido mucho esta cuestión de la Vida y la Muerte. Me parece que lo que llaman mi sombra aquí en la tierra es mi substancia auténtica. Me parece que, al mirar las cosas espirituales, somo demasiado como ostras que observan el sol a través del agua y piensan que la densa agua es la mas fina de las atmosferas.
~ Herman Melville
how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
~ Herman Melville
Thus, while in the life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
~ Herman Melville
But what then? 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.
~ Herman Melville
Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
~ Herman Melville
Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin.
~ Herman Melville
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
~ Herman Melville
Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?
~ Herman Melville
Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumour of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.
~ Herman Melville
even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
~ Herman Melville
In a world, 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.
~ Herman Melville
Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
~ 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.
~ Herman Melville
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.
~ Herman Melville