Best quotes from Bartleby, The Scrivener

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence, my next, method.

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

Bartleby: ‘I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.‘

The truth was, I suppose, that a man of so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time.

As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.