quotes from classic

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?

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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.

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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...

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The scythe that advances forever and never needs whetting.

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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...

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They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

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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...

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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.

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We die, because we live.

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The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and pol...

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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...

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Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse.

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Death my lord!—it is the deadest of all things.

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Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least their care:...

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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...

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This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last.

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I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

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Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

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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...

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In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

more quotes from Herman Melville