Moby Dick - pg. 267

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern  Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated  against it. All that most maddens and torments; all the stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all the cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought;; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visible personified, and made practically assailablle in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.