Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Quotes

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

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

There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

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

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.

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

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.

The gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

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