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

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities

He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married... Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair

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

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

Toil is man's allotment toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects

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