Quotes 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.
But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
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.
Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
Art is the objectification of feeling.
For 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 encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
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.
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Oh! mock not the poniarded heart. The stabbed man knows the steel; prate not to him that it is only a ticking feather.
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...
In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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...
Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last.
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...
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least their care:...
Death my lord!—it is the deadest of all things.
Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse.
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...
The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and pol...
We die, because we live.
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.
