Moby Dick; or, The Whale Quotes

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.

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

All mortal greatness is but disease.

Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

My body is but the lees of my better being.

I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.

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

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

I try all things, I achieve what I can.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Call me Ishmael.

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.

Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates.