Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Or, The Whale Quotes

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

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.

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...

Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order.

Thy silence, then that voices thee.

Ignorance is the parent of fear ...

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.

So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.

Come what will, one comfort's always left — that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.

... the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril,

... an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face-at least to my taste-his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.

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