Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.

...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of ; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone ; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.