The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Call me Ishmael.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851) opening words
Delight—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
God, and is only a patriot to heaven.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851) ch. 1
But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in
fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take
that individual aside and argue the point with him.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851) ch. 17
A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851) ch. 24
This it is, that forever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and
leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through
their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their
undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851) ch. 33
From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851)
Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as
last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.
‘Moby Dick’ (1851) ch. 132
1.108 Gilles Mènage 1613-92
Comme nous nous entretenions de ce qui pouvait rendre heureux, je lui dis; Sanitas sanitatum,
et omnia sanitas.
While we were discussing what could make one happy, I said to him: Sanitas sanitatum et
omnia sanitas.
From a conversation with Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1594-1654), in ‘Mènagiana’ (1693) p. 166 (sanitas
health).
1.109 Menander c.342-292 B.C.
Whom the gods love dies young.
‘Dis Exapaton’ fragment 4, in F. H. Sandbach (ed.) ‘Menandri Reliquiae Selectae’ (1990)
We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.
‘The Lady of Andros’ in ‘Menander: the Principal Fragments’ translated by F. G. Allinson (1951) p. 316
1.110 H. L. Mencken 1880-1956
He [Calvin Coolidge] slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero
fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
‘American Mercury’ April 1933