Moby-Dick

Famous quotes

• Call me Ishmael.

  Chapter IIn context

• Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

  Chapter IIn context

  • Nature
  • Thinking

• Who aint a slave? Tell me that.

  Chapter IIn context

  • Freedom

• There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

  Chapter IIn context

  • Money
  • Work

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

  Chapter IIn context

  • Risk

• Ignorance is the parent of fear

  Chapter IIIIn context

  • Fear
  • Knowledge

• But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

  Chapter VIIIn context

  • Faith
  • Hope

• In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

  Chapter IXIn context

  • Money
  • Virtue

• Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!

  Chapter IXIn context

  • Honor
  • Virtue

• Delight is to him⁠—a far, far upward, and inward delight⁠—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.

  Chapter IXIn context

  • Character
  • Courage

• Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.

  Chapter XIIn context

  • Philosophy

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

  Chapter XIIIn context

• For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

  Chapter XVIIn context

  • Success

• I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also.

  Chapter XVIIIn context

  • Religion

• A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

  Chapter XXIVIn context

  • Education
  • Experience

• Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

  Chapter XXIXIn context

  • Age

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

  Chapter XXIXIn context

  • Comedy
  • Sleep

• Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.

  Chapter XXXVIIn context

  • Anger
  • Motivation & Goals

• All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.

  Chapter XXXVIIn context

  • Philosophy
  • Truth & Lies

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

  Chapter XXXVIIn context

  • Anger
  • Pride

• Truth hath no confines.

  Chapter XXXVIIn context

  • Truth & Lies

• All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

  Chapter XLIIn context

  • Good & Evil

• 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 for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

  Chapter XLIVIn context

  • Thinking

• Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

  Chapter LXVIIIIn context

  • Advice
  • Character

• O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

  Chapter LXXIn context

  • Nature
  • Philosophy

• Even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

  Chapter XCVIIn context

  • Character

• 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.

  Chapter CIVIn context

  • Writing

• Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?

  Chapter CXXXIIIn context

  • Freedom
  • God

• To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

  Chapter CXXXVIn context

  • Anger
  • Enemies

• Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

  Chapter CXXXVIn context

  • Nature
  • Time

Contents