Ishmael

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life."

"The Pequod was my Yale College and my Harvard."

"For I am bound to that fisherman by a sort of structure in the very bones of his body."

"I try all things, I achieve what I can; therefore I am content."

"Some certain significance lurks in all things; else all things are little worth."

"There is a wisdom that is woe and a woe that is madness."

"Humanity has forgotten how to create; now it only consumes and destroys."

"The whale swims free where no man can touch him, in depths we cannot fathom."

"How small are the greatest oaks to what they were in the primeval forest!"

"The whiteness of the whale symbolizes the terror of the unknown."

"In my younger and more vulnerable days, I shipped aboard this vessel."

"Some man of uncommon ability must have fashioned so strange a craft."

"Every man carries within him an entire universe of wants and desires."

"In the depths below, there are wonders beyond mortal comprehension."

"Call me Ishmael."

"Some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth."

"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

"The line! The line!"

"There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath."

"The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last."

"There was something unreal about every outline of the scene before me."

"I feel as though I am but a speck in this vast blue immensity."

"The Sperm Whale of the present day is as much an altered and diminished apparition of the mighty monster as the Hunter or the poacher of the Middle Ages."

"He seemed to me like a man who had tried the world again and again and had lost the respect of both sides."

"Not a single limb of him that is not a club; his body is all muscle."

"All the subtle demonism of life and thought is prisoned in the skull."

"Beware of the man with a fixed purpose."

"In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here."

"One touches a live thing, an electrode; and you receive a shock."

"There is no steady unreeling progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause."