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Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.

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Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Profession: Novelist
Nationality: American

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Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.

It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.

But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the airs smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping?

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Morning to ye! Morning to ye!

Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

Oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.

Command the murderous chalices...Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick!

How wondrous familiar is a fool!

Nature cared not a jot.

Now, as I before hinted, 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 don't believe it also.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

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