Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

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.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Art is the objectification of feeling.