Quotes by Herman Melville
For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of t...
They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
Though an unpleasant sort of person, and even a queer threatener withal, yet, if one meets him, one must get along with him as one can; for hi...
The scythe that advances forever and never needs whetting.
The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn...
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swanlike sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.
People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward; but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably --why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work --for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head
The Cave of Jeremiah is in this part. In its lamentable recesses he composed his lamentable Lamentations.
There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fairmindedness should be confounded with political...
'Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and t...
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Juxtaposition marries men.
That nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness which, in every refined and honorable attachment, is...
At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Li...
"He's asleep, ain't he?" "With kings and counsellors," murmured I.
Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have she...
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.
When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without -- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
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 encompasse...
Coke and Blackstone hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets.
Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.
But some who this blithe mood present, As on in lightsome files they fare,...
