Some Moby-Dick quotes I like:
2025-05-05
And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.
He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?
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.
I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.
“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” deliriously howled Ahab,
There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting!
Read it if you can.