Herman Melville Quotes

Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.

So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.

All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.

O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

What like a bullet can undeceive!

O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.

Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.

...flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.

[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.

Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face-at least to my taste-his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.

... an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

... the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril,

Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.

Come what will, one comfort's always left — that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

Ignorance is the parent of fear ...

Thy silence, then that voices thee.

Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers — ambition and indigestion.

Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order.

...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic - especially toward the Fourth of July.

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.

Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness

and yet a child’s utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.

...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

He who has never failed somewhere that man cannot be great.

He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it.