experiencing life through an always-nuanced worldview.

Seeing as Moby Dick by Melville is one of my favorite books, it only makes sense to put up my favorite quotes from this book. I haven’t finished going through the book and typing up all the quotes I like, but here are the ones so far. The page numbers are from the Signet edition (blue cover, picture of a white whale).

“But these are all landsmen…Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land…They must get just as nigh as the water as they possibly can without falling in.” Pg. 2

“But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” Pg. 3

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.” Pg. 21

“the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Pg. 24

“a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity.” Pg. 28

“how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city…But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” Pg. 35

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.” Pgs. 35-36

“And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.” Pg. 40

“You cannot hide the soul.” Pg. 48

“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. Nothing exists in itself.” Pg. 52

“Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.” Pg. 52

“see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.” Pg. 52

“For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness…O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” Pg. 71

“for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” Pg. 79

“But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.” Pg. 83

“for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it.” Pg. 112

“As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided.” Pg. 113

“Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.” Pg. 119

“I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.” Pg. 127

“the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing.” Pg. 149

Ahab speaking—“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond…That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him…I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Pg. 157

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.” Pg. 178

“Is is that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as an essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color atheism from which we shrink?” Pg. 188

“…Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed thread of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I , with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worrying, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regard this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.” Pg. 219

“strange forms in the water…[and] sea-ravens…therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.” Pg. 227

“But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over his round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.” Pg. 230

“So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a-whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.” Pg. 259

“yet for ever and ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it…But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring…[T]he sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks…NO mercy, no power but its own controls it.” Pg. 267

“Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land, and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” Pg. 268

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

“we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things!” Pg. 299

“history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedeviling so many others.” Pg. 305-306

“this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap…True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life…do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.” Pg.310-311; talking about monkey ropes

“Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.” Pg. 311-312

“The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world, from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view…So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him…it is quite impossible for him…to examine any two things—however large or however small—at one and the same instant of time…in order to see one [of the objects], in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other [object] will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite directions?” Pg. 320-321

“But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.” Pg. 321-322

“The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false bow to the uncommon world.” Pg. 338

“For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone.” Pg. 338