If you are taking notes, a Crestomathy is collection of quotes.
What follows is collaged from the pages that this man wrote.
It can be said that his story is all about men gone deep-sea fishin'
But these words from MOBY DICK are all about the human condition
Herman Melville
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Call me Ishmael...
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.
Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–
stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will
infallibly lead you to water.
Meditation and water are wed forever.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me
to get a broom and sweep down the deck.
Who aint a slave? Tell me that.
The old sea-captains may order me about–however they may thump
and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing it is all right;
that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way–
either in a physical or metaphysical point of view.
All the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
Ignorance is the parent of fear.
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and too scarce a thing;
the more’s the pity.
The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him,
be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
How bitterly will burst the straps in the first howling gale,
when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all,
down the throat of the tempest.
Looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters
observing the sun through the water. The world is a ship
on its passage out, and not a voyage complete.
The pulpit is its prow.
Replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful
men of God, this pulpit is a self-containing stronghold.
Sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport;
whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
Conscience is the wound and there is naught to staunch it.
Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness.
What is said in heat, that thing unsays itself.
One most perilous and long voyage ends, then begins a second;
and a second ends, then begins a third...Such is the endlessness
of all the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
All men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.
A man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
Think not, is my eleventh commandment and sleep when you can,
is my twelfth.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will,
I’ll go to it laughing.
Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling.
A soul is a sort of fifth wheel to a wagon.
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations,
never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
even a congregation of ants worshiping a toad-stool.
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And so full of his thought was Ahab. You could almost see that thought
turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced. So completely
possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould
of every outer movement.
The clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever
all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
He will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife
in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is,
though she keeps so many moody secrets.
I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm
to comprehend itself. The path to my fixed purpose is laid
with iron rails...My soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges,
through the rifled hearts of mountains...unerringly I rush!
Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a practical joke,
though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects
the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
To any monomaniacal man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
If you have never seen the sight of a dead sperm whale moored by night
to a whale ship at sea then suspend your decision about the propriety
of devil-worship.
As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks
when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once been
occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
But pity there was none.
For all his old age and his blind eyes, he must die the death
and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other
merry-makings of men, and to illuminate the solemn churches
that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.
More than equally, since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further
than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
How dost thou know that some entire living, thinking thing may not be invisibly
standing precisely where thou now standest?
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