Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the...
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul;whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,and bringing up the rear of...
Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.
Here some one thrust these cards into these old hands of mine, swears that I must play them, and no others. And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right, live in the game, and die in it.
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years...
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.
From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved...
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult a...
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, b...
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,...
Art is the objectification of feeling.
Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.