"That old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what’s made in fire...

"No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man." Musing: This chapter of the book reads...

"How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open...

"Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is...

"Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe....

"The most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every...

"Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that present suffering was but the direct issue of...

"We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality."

"Thus we see how the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play."

"Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s."

"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...

"So magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk."

"One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one."

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our...

"Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the...

"Since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale."

"For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least....

"There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see."

"Born in throes, it is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs!"

"The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are...