Moby Dick Quotes

“Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“...there is a delicacy in it equalled only by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick