Quotes from Herman Melville

For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.

if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

Command the murderous chalices...Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick!

As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea

Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories. Now

the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain (i.e. even while living) in the congregation of the dead.

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.

But war is pain, and hate is woe.

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.

There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that

What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.

Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. Whilst