Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing--mores the pity.
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
…for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that onc...
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung.
Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how th...
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in som...
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
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...
The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.
I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and t...
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds...
Genius is full of trash.
If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.