English - Moby Dick - Quote ID's

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet...then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship." (14)

Ishmael

"And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." (15-16)

Ishmael

"Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity." (18)

Ishmael

"What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself-- the man's a human being just as I am: He has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian" (32)

Ishmael

"And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists" (45)

Father Mapple

"You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart." (51)

Ishmael

"I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it...I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.' (52)

Ishmael

"For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens." (56)

Ishmael

"He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man" (75)

Captain Peleg

"As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then." (76)

Ishmael

"Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before." (84)

Elijah

"All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore. But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoeless, 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" (95)

Ishmael

"There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance" (107)

Ishmael

"Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth" (110)

Stubb

"'How now...this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! Hard it must go with me if they charm be gone!" (111)

Captain Ahab

"With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I-- being left completely to myself as such a thought-engendering altitude,-- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, 'Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.'" (134)

Ishmael

"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. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave." ()

Captain Ahab

"I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance" (138)

Starbuck

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!...that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous." ()

Starbuck

"The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." (142)

Captain Ahab

"I think I see his impious end, but I feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut" (142)

Starbuck

"...a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer, and come what will, one comfort's always left-- that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated...I know now all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing." (143)

Stubb

"...my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs...A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine." (149)

Ishmael

"...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it" (154)

Ishmael

"...it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror" (160)

Ishmael