Quotes about Herman Melville

Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible. I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.

I started at a sound so strange, long-drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand and I stood gazing...

For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle

Who's got some paregoric? said Stubb, he has the stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he's lost his tiller.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions.

Starbuck was no crusaders after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions.

even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.

Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.