Herman Melville

I would prefer not to.

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.

The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Towards thee I roll thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Youth is immortal; / Tis the elderly only grow old!

Beware the People weeping / When they bare the iron hand.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for 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 of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

Wag the world how it will, / Leaves must be green in Spring.

Implacable I, the implacable Sea; / Implacable most when most I smile serene—/ Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.

Wiser in relish, if sedate, / Come graybeards to their roses late.

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

Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

A laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer.

Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.

Nothing may help or heal / While Amor incensed remembers wrong.

The terrors of truth and dart of death / To faith alike are vain.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.

Everyone knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything cooly is to do it genteelly.

Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.