Herman Melville Quotes
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.
I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
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.
Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
And tell him to paint me a sign, with-no suicides permitted here, and no smloing in the parlor; might as well kill both birds at once.
Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.
The only ugliness is that of the heart, seen through the face. And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible.
That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.
The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
The world's a ship on its voyage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.
I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.
But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.
Until we understand that our grief outweighs a thousand joys, we will never understand what Christianity is all about.
Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.
The dinner-hour is the summer of the day: full of sunshine, I grant; but not like the mellow autumn of supper.
We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.
Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
