Quotes by Herman Melville

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.

Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.

The eyes are the gateway to the soul.

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature.

There are some persons in this world, who, being perhaps innocent in themselves, yet are guilty of indirect harms.

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.

God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught.

I would prefer not to.

A man can be honest in any sort of skin.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God — so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!

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.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

Fate cannot rob us of the memories that we keep within.

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads.

Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.

The sun comes out, a golden huzzar, from his tent, flashing his helm on the world.

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

And if at whiles the bubble, blown too thin, Seem nigh on bursting,—if you quickly bring The ruddy nipple to the stopper, drink That more intoxicating drop.

All right, then: shipmates, you got a fish in you.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.

You might as well say that a man who is in the habit of making earnest inquiries, and of scrutinizing, is either a fool, or else has his brains battered out.

Ye cannot hide the soul.

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

Whatever meaning lies in the analogy, it is always worth while to stir the brain with it.

Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.

Whoever is not in the possession of everything is in the possession of nothing.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.

The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

Tranquillity, in respect to man's soul, means a temperate living on all things and abstinence from none.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

The world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

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.

There are some persons in this world, who, at the mere illusion of looking at any more prudently in the mirror, feel a sort of bloodshot certainty, of which their blood is made.

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.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.

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

There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.

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

Strange and harrowing must be the story which is exhausted in the first few chapters.

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.

Some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher.

Stranger! if thou hast learned a truth which needs no school of long experience, that the world is a mask, and that when thou destroyest the mask, thou revealest the mystery; but ten times the mask itself is mystery.

So far as what we call time may be reckoned by man, that period which is either a portion of the whole, or the whole, of the human race.

So true it is, that although in contemplating the political institutions of America, we should warm as benevolence loves to warm with the sight of all the blessings which these institutions shed upon man.

See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

Sailors are like savages; they must be treated as such.

Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

One must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

Not all who own woods love them; not all who love them own them.

My means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

Methinks that in the wildest rage of his fiercest mood, there was always a deep half latent dread, that, in some unmomented fit of unthoughtful, unwatchful instant, the bantering deity would leave him.

Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

I try all things, I achieve what I can.

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

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

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee; deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalesmen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business.

Call me Ishmael.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

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

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.