Moby Dick

By Herman Melville

QUOTATION: The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 26, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 10, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick, ch. 110 (1851).

QUOTATION: Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 102, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: Your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 53, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 5, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 41, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 79, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 41, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

QUOTATION: That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 96, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988).

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