Quotes from Herman Melville

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

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul

See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

You have but noted his fair cheek. A man-trap may be under his fine ruddy-tipped daisies.

There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

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

No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.

But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.