Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Quotes

The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser.

Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.

Truth hath no confines.

The pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt.

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.

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.

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.

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.