For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. — Herman Melville. American writer and poet (1819–1891)
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.
From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.
Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all dreadfully cracked about the head and desperately in need of mending.
Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.