Herman Melville - Moby-Dick (1851)

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

Herman Melville
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.

Herman Melville
It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.

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

Herman Melville
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

Herman Melville
Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Herman Melville
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

Herman Melville
All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Herman Melville
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Herman Melville
I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

Herman Melville
Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

Herman Melville
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants...

Herman Melville
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.… Strike, strike through the mask!

Herman Melville
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.

Herman Melville
Ha, ha, my ship! Thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun.

Herman Melville
Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.

Herman Melville
The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!

Herman Melville
But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt... we dispatched it with great expedition.

Herman Melville
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.

Herman Melville
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Herman Melville
Thou great democratic God!... who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!

Herman Melville
A laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer.

Herman Melville
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Herman Melville
I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.

Herman Melville
Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall!

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.

Herman Melville
By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

Herman Melville
A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Herman Melville
And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

Herman Melville