Herman Melville Quotes

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

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

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

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fair mindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair."

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

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.

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.

The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

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

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.

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.