Top 529 Quotes & Sayings by Herman Melville

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

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

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.

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

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

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.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

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

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

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

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

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

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

Art is the objectification of feeling.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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.

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

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

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.

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

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.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

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

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

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

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

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

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.

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.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

Truth is in things, and not in words.

The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.

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

Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty.

Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Ignorance is the father of all fear.

Only the man who says no is free

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.

The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

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.