Some whaling wisdom....

"It was not down in any map; true places never are."

"It might be thought that this was a poor was to accumulate a princely fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I one of those who never take on about princely fortunes, and I am quite content if the world is willing to board and lodge me..."

"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."

"For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything."

This is why I love Ahab: "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines."
He is a keenly intelligent and cunning, strategizing raving lunatic. But he is transcended!! Take that Emerson and Thoreau.

"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."

"Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blackness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colorless, all color atheism from which we shrink?"


On pirates:
"Why it is that...all Pirates...cherish such a scornful feeling toward Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of Pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertation the pirate has no solid basis to stand on."