Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
In fact, tell him I've diddled him, and perhaps somebody else.
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and w...
We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily...
We cannibals must help these Christians.
We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things...
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornad...
Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.
Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for avast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and m...
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of...
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, t...
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
I would be as free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books.
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.
I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the plane...
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.