Best quotes by Herman Melville

This divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate-- Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate.

We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.

Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?

It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out ; so, in digging in one s soul for the fine gold of genius, much dulness and common-place is first brought to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but he is like the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse cannot be clapped into his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street before his own door, for the public functionaries to take care of.

Prayer draws us near to our own souls.

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of ; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone ; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.

Implacable I, the implacable Sea; Implacable most when most I smile serene- Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.

Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.

I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.

Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand.

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.

A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.

In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

What like a bullet can undeceive!

People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.

In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt--a wind to freeze; Sad patience--joyous energies; Humility--yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity--reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel--Art.

The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.

I will frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of- war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.

We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

I never fancied broiling fowls; - though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.

The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.

Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits... they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

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

...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.

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.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.

Everyone knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything cooly is to do it genteelly.

...in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

Nothing may help or heal While Amor incensed remembers wrong.

The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues madethem great and noble. They possessed a natural majesty that was not put on and taken off at pleasure, as was that of certain eastern monarchs when they put on or took off their garments of Tyrian dye. It is hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.

flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.

He, who, in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it.

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.

Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.

O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.

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

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

If not against us, nature is not for us.

What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather.

Father Mapple paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.

I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil. (Ego baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.)

What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?).

Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.

None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.

Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.

Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while they enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grind-stone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty.

There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.

Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.

We cannibals must help these Christians.

The result of civilization, at the Sandwich Islands and elsewhere, is found productive to the civilizers, destructive to the civilizees. It is said to be compensation--a very philosophical word; but it appears to be very much on the principle of the old game, "You lose, I win": good philosophy for the winner.

Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone; and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.

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

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.

God is liberal of color; so should man be.