In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive [Jonah] is now too plainly known.
The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him ...
46
And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the
very magnets that thus drew me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian
kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. 52
... no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if
darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more
congenial to our clayey part. 55
'Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,' he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
main-mast. 105
For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters.
They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance. 76
Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed
ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give
succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper,
warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the
port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one
touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would maker her shudder through and
through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, she fight
'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed
sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her
only friend her bitterest foe! [atheism] 109
God, keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay,
but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience. 147
'Hark ye yet again, --the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as
pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there,
some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features
from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!
How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? ... 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. 167
Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've
dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad! --Starbuck
does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm
to comprehend itself! 171
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years
ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian
coast last voyage ... 439
I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is
defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for that thou
canst but kill; and all are killed. ... In the midst of the personified
impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I
came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives
in me, and feels her royal rights. 514
There can be no hearts above the snow line. ... Lo! ye believers in god's all
goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of
suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of
the sweet things of love and gratitude. 529
Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!
Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee! 535
Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they
will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wive's darkling hint. 560
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 blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snow--a colorless,
all-color of atheism from which we shrink? p?