Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none. (Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener")
And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed... (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
But the only thing to be considered here, is this - what kind of oil is used in coronations? Certainly it cannot be Olive Oil, or Maccasar Oil, nor Caster Oil, nor Bear's Oil, nor Train Oil, nor Cod-Liver Oil. What then can it possibly be but Sperm Oil in it's unmanufactured unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils? (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
But what is worship? - to do the will of God - that is worship. And what is the will of God? - to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me - that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connections? (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")
Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil? (Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick")