Best quotes by Herman Melville
Herman Melville
American novelist, short story writer
Herman Melville (born August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the centennial of his birth in 1919 was the starting point of a Melville revival, and Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the island. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.
Herman Melville quotes by category:
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing.
When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.
Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.
Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
Silence is the only Voice of our God.
Nature is nobody's ally.
I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
The most mighty of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.
Failure is the true test of greatness
If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
The eyes are the gateway to the soul.
True places are not found on maps.
Aid my disillusionment, my friend!
See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.
Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence... Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.
Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.
You cannot hide the soul.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Truth is in things, and not in words.
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
Art is the objectification of feeling.
The pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bearthe earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invokedfor favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?
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.
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.
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.
The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
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.
In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.
There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright goodfeeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless--well, finish the sentence for yourself.
My body is but the lees of my better being.
Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
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.
Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
We cannot live for ourselves alone.