Moby-Dick

"To be enraged with you for having observed Moby Dick, that accursed white whale, is as if to rage with a dumb brute that kicked you."

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

"The line! The line!"

"I am bound to that old man by cords woven of my very heartstrings."

"It is the whiteness of the whale that wrings me."

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

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

"Call me Ishmael."

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

"What is the world but a stage for ambition and vengeance?"

"To hunt the white whale is to hunt the very essence of the infinite."

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

"I feel as a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck!"

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

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

"Death is but a shadow that passes across the deck at twilight."

"I have crossed oceans of time to find this one white whale."

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

"As a mortal man, I am bound by mortal laws, but as captain, I answer only to God."

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

"I see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice sinewing it."

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

"To know all is to forgive all, but I am neither knowing nor forgiving."

"The compass of man's true course depends upon the true bearing of the stars."

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

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

"I stand alone upon this deck, not as a ship's captain commands, but as the Fates ordain."

"Better shun the world and live alone with honest thoughts than to be surrounded by treacherous schemes."

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee."

"I am the captain of my soul."