Quotes About Mystery

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.

Herman Melville

this whale carries the everlasting mail!

that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank.

En yüce hakikat iÅŸte bu karas?z, k?y?s?z, bizatihi Tanr? kadar uçsuz bucaks?z halde gizlidir.

Herman Melville

For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself?

Las cosas mas maravillosas son siempre las inexpresables.

Qué son los comprensibles terreros del hombre comparados con los terrores y prodigios entremezclados de Dios?

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.

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

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.

Usher—threadbare

It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.— It's a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.

But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Ma quando viaggiando non facciamo altro che inseguire i remoti misteri di cui sogniamo, o dare la caccia in modo straziante a quel fantasma demoniaco che prima o poi nuota davanti a ogni cuore umano; allora, quando diamo la caccia a cose del genere tutt'intorno a questo tondo globo, tali cose ci portano all'interno di sterili labirinti, oppure ci lasciano sommersi a metà strada.

Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows.

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.

Herman Melville

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.

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

Herman Melville