"Did you fixedly gaze upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints - the foot-prints of his one...

"Every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form,...

"Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the...

"Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back...

"My object here is simply to project the draft of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder."

"As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is...

"Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale."

"There's a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more...

"How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?"

"For every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless...