Quotes 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 indulged.
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
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 practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
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.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
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.
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
How wondrous familiar is a fool!
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.
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
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.
He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married... Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
