Best quotes by Herman Melville

In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.

Youth is immortal; Tis the elderly only grow old!

It is against the will of God that the East should be Christianized.

Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.

Youth is the time when hearts are large.

Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.

True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.

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

Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man.

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.

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.

If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury; if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.

There is a woe that is wisdom, a woe that is madness.

In glades they meet skull after skull Where pine cones lay-the rusted gun, Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat And cuddled up skeleton; And scores of such. Some start as in dreams, And comrades lost bemoan; By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged- But the year and the Man were gone.

What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?

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.

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

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?

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

If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.

If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.

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

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

The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of thy body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be.

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.

This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.

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

In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.

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.

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

I would prefer not to.

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

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

Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions.

Immortality is but ubiquity in time.

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.

I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.

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

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.

All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.

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.

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

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing

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.

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.

Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

In some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.

We die, because we live.

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

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.

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.

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.

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