Ishmael

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

"All evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick."

"Meditation and water are wedded for ever."

"It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life."

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke."

"The try-works were full of fire and boiling oil, in which the whiteness and blackness of the whale were vaporizing."

"He knows a fragrant thing when he smells it."

"I now recalled all the circumstances connected with the Japanese plague, and the advice of the captain."

"And some certain significance lurks in all things, or this one thing is not worth the telling."

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

"The silent, subtle, ever-present persuasion of the sea; its vastness overwhelms all thought of motive or record."

"How small are all earthly concretes to the infinite!"

"There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast."

"Queequeg died as became a man: with his face to the light."

"The great Ketos or Whale, as a distinct species of the leviathan, is by all odds the most formidable of all whales to encounter at sea."

"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."

"Thus have I sailed the world, as a ship sails the sea, without ever touching shore."

"Who reads the most is he that speaks the least of what he reads."

"A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!"

"She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; a Norwegian built and Japanese rigged affair."

"The Pequod's crew were all islanders; every one, all, without exception."

"What one sees vaguely in a far distance may shape itself all differently when approached."

"It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me."

"That monomaniac Ahab sailed on by night and day; and through the clear sunshine and through the billowed gloom of his dreams, aye, and through the death of two ships."

"Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea is this—the first keeps his mercury in the glass and carefully charts his course; the latter steers by what he sees above water."

"He sought to strike through the mask, and strike through the wall, to reach the malicious agent beyond."

"Call me Ishmael."

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

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

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