Famous Herman Melville Quotations

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"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."
by Herman Melville
"The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion."
by Herman Melville
"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things."
by Herman Melville
"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shores our bed and eats at our own table."
by Herman Melville
"For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness."
by Herman Melville
"From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it."
by Herman Melville
"He who has never failed somewhere. . . that man can not be great."
by Herman Melville
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
by Herman Melville
"Life's a voyage that's homeward bound."
by Herman Melville
"Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes."
by Herman Melville
"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed."
by Herman Melville
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes the whole universe for a vast practical joke."
by Herman Melville
"They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. The dignity is in leisure."
by Herman Melville
"Toward the accomplishment of an aim, which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort."
by Herman Melville
"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."
by Herman Melville
"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."
by Herman Melville
"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."
by Herman Melville
"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."
by Herman Melville
"Where does the violet tint end and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blending enter into the other. So with sanity and insanity."
by Herman Melville
"Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter. To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram -- lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull -- he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins -- that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path -- he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales -- happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are curing the wound, when come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and, to wind up, with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep."
by Herman Melville
"Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!"
by Herman Melville
"Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic."
by Herman Melville
"If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid."
by Herman Melville
"Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, --for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it -- not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation."
by Herman Melville
"He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great."
by Herman Melville
"There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man."
by Herman Melville
"In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods."
by Herman Melville
"Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity."
by Herman Melville
"We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us."
by Herman Melville
"When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without -- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!"
by Herman Melville
"The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his."
by Herman Melville
"Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory -- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended."
by Herman Melville
"People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward; but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably --why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work --for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?"
by Herman Melville
"They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure."
by Herman Melville
"The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head"
by Herman Melville
"For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swanlike sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none."
by Herman Melville
"How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg -- a cozy, loving pair."
by Herman Melville
"The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass."
by Herman Melville
"'He's asleep, ain't he?' 'With kings and counsellors,' murmured I."
by Herman Melville
"Adrift dissolving, bound for death; Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one—..."
by Herman Melville
"A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."
by Herman Melville
"All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque."
by Herman Melville
"As this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompasse..."
by Herman Melville
"At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Li..."
by Herman Melville
"Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those so..."
by Herman Melville
"Behold here the fate of a sailor! They give him the last toss, and no one asks whose child he was."
by Herman Melville
"But some who this blithe mood present, As on in lightsome files they fare,..."
by Herman Melville
"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, t..."
by Herman Melville
"Coke and Blackstone hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets."
by Herman Melville
"Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have she..."
by Herman Melville
"Death my lord!—it is the deadest of all things."
by Herman Melville
"Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least their care:..."
by Herman Melville
"For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of t..."
by Herman Melville
"Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep."
by Herman Melville
"I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist."
by Herman Melville
"However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever..."
by Herman Melville
"In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads th..."
by Herman Melville
"Juxtaposition marries men."
by Herman Melville
"Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so ..."
by Herman Melville
"Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories."
by Herman Melville
"Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."
by Herman Melville
"Oh! mock not the poniarded heart. The stabbed man knows the steel; prate not to him that it is only a ticking feather."
by Herman Melville
"Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be..."
by Herman Melville
"That nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness which, in every refined and honorable attachment, is..."
by Herman Melville
"That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter Piper. How would she have set..."
by Herman Melville
"The Cave of Jeremiah is in this part. In its lamentable recesses he composed his lamentable Lamentations."
by Herman Melville
"The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn..."
by Herman Melville
"The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and pol..."
by Herman Melville
"The most mighty of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life."
by Herman Melville
"The scythe that advances forever and never needs whetting."
by Herman Melville
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practica..."
by Herman Melville
"There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fairmindedness should be confounded with political..."
by Herman Melville
"There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real impassi..."
by Herman Melville
"There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid."
by Herman Melville
"These marbles, the works of the dreamers and idealists of old, live on, leading and pointing to good. They are the works of visionaries and dr..."
by Herman Melville
"Through the port comes the moon-shine astray! It tips the guard's cutlass and silvers this nook;..."
by Herman Melville
"This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last."
by Herman Melville
"'Tis right to fight for freedom, whoever be the thrall."
by Herman Melville
"'Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and t..."
by Herman Melville
"Though an unpleasant sort of person, and even a queer threatener withal, yet, if one meets him, one must get along with him as one can; for hi..."
by Herman Melville
"Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse."
by Herman Melville
"We die, because we live."
by Herman Melville
"We die of too much life."
by Herman Melville


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