For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.
Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.
We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?
Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.
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. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.
It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
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