Quotes About Discovery

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.

I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?

Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face.

Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the

street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

It's not down in any map; true places never are.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are.

Every heart is ice-bound till wine melt it, and reveal the tender grass and sweet herbage budding below, with every dear secret, hidden before like a dropped jewel in a snow-bank, lying there unsuspected through winter till spring.

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest.

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water

Benim üniversitem Yale de deÄŸildi Harvard da, bir balina gemisiydi.

Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one;

Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region

Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations.

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

for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid- and nobody is there!-appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!

Be it determined, however, that each one this records is given by means of a man who, in line with his personal assertion, become only at one of the islands, and remained there however two weeks, slumbering every night on board his ship, and taking little child-glove excursions ashore within the sunlight hours, attended by an armed birthday celebration.