Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it, what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare. Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
The robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:-- through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
For here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
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.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows-- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God!
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 1851