Herman Melville Quotes
There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.
There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable.
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
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.
Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?
In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.
War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.
Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.
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.
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.
In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.
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, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.
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 indulged.
I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.
Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.