1. “Call me Ishmael.”
2. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
3. “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”
4. “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
5. “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; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
6. “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”
7. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
8. “There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.”
9. “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”
10. “I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person does not believe it also.”
11. “Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses,—for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it.”
12. “There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
13. “Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels through his own stone heart.”
14. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
15. “I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person does not believe it also.”
16. “Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
17. “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
18. “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 had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
19. “For there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
20. “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
21. “There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness.”
22. “It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
23. “Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”
24. “The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”
25. “There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!”
26. “Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.”
27. “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 had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
28. “The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.”
