Moby Dick Quotes

“Nay, church itself is a sort of whale; the pulpit is its spout-hole. … What other marvels does whale’s oil accomplish? Not only candles and lamps are supplied by it, but churches themselves are lit up with it. Yes, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in all the most splendid churches in Christendom, whale-oil candles burn before the altar.”
― Melville Herman, Moby Dick

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling— a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees3 of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with—‘no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick