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...
Loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses
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.
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.
I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow
Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.
Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on.
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...
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
Start her, now; give 'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy--start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--easy, easy--only start her like grim death and...
Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.
Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.
Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.