Top 529 Quotes & Sayings by Herman Melville - Page 5

Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

I would prefer not to.

Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.

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.

As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.

I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

An indiscriminate distrust of human nature is the worst consequence of a miserable condition, whether brought about by innocence or guilt. And though want of suspicion more than want of sense, sometimes leads a man into harm; yet too much suspicion is as bad as too little sense.

When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.

It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.

Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil?

Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.

The terrors of truth and dart of death To faith alike are vain.

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

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.

But Captain Vere was now again motionless, standing absorbed in thought. Again starting, he vehemently exclaimed, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet that angel must hang!

We die, because we live.

And tell him to paint me a sign, with-no suicides permitted here, and no smloing in the parlor; might as well kill both birds at once.

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

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

Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.

At banquets surfeit not, but fill; partake, and retire; and eat not again till you crave.

Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions.

He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

Immortality is but ubiquity in time.

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. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

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

Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.

Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by.

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

It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.

To certain temperaments, especially when previously agitated by any deep feeling, there is perhaps nothing more exasperating, andwhich sooner explodes all self-command, than the coarse, jeering insolence of a porter, cabman, or hack-driver.

But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.

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

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?

There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.

Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.

The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.

Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?

Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.

While nature thus very early and very abundantly feeds us, she is very late in tutoring us as to the proper methodization of our diet.

Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled.

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing

Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.

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

To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. "I would prefer not to quit you", he replied, gently emphasizing the not.

The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.

Let us only hate hatred; and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.

Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.

When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?--Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us--Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians--sprung from one head and made in one image.

Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.

Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?

Until we understand that our grief outweighs a thousand joys, we will never understand what Christianity is all about.