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Quotes by Herman Melville


It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
– Herman Melville
Art is the objectification of feeling.
– Herman Melville
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
– Herman Melville
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, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
– Herman Melville
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
– Herman Melville
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!
– Herman Melville
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married... Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
– Herman Melville
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
– Herman Melville
How wondrous familiar is a fool!
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
– Herman Melville
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
– Herman Melville
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.
– Herman Melville
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
– Herman Melville
So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
– Herman Melville
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, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
– Herman Melville
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
– Herman Melville
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
– 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.
– Herman Melville
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.
– Herman Melville
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.
– Herman Melville
When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
– Herman Melville
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
– Herman Melville
Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
– Herman Melville
Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.
– Herman Melville
Truth is in things, and not in words.
– Herman Melville
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
– Herman Melville
Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
– Herman Melville
Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.
– Herman Melville
At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
– Herman Melville
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
– Herman Melville