Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I would prefer not to.”

— Herman Melville

Featured in: Ego Quotes

2. “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

— Herman Melville

3. “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.”

— Herman Melville

4. “God’s one and only voice is silence.”

— Herman Melville

5. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

— Herman Melville

Featured in: Adventure Quotes, Quotes About Laughing, Quotes About Laughter

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

— Herman Melville

7. “Call me Ishmael.”

— Herman Melville

8. “The eyes are the gateway to the soul.”

— Herman Melville

9. “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.”

— Herman Melville

10. “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.”

— Herman Melville

11. “Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.”

— Herman Melville

12. “We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”

— Herman Melville

13. “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

— Herman Melville

14. “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.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

16. “Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.”

— Herman Melville

17. “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.”

— Herman Melville

18. “A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.”

— Herman Melville

Featured in: Smile Quotes

19. “Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.”

— Herman Melville

20. “Failure is the true test of greatness.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

22. “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.”

— Herman Melville

23. “Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

25. “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.”

— Herman Melville

26. “I try all things, I achieve what I can.”

— Herman Melville

27. “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.”

— Herman Melville

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

28. “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

— Herman Melville

29. “Only the man who says no is free.”

— Herman Melville

30. “The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.”

— Herman Melville

31. “They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.”

— Herman Melville

32. “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.”

— Herman Melville

33. “We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.”

— Herman Melville

34. “A good laugh is a mighty good thing, a rather too scarce a good thing.”

— Herman Melville

35. “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

— Herman Melville

36. “No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.”

— Herman Melville

37. “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?”

— Herman Melville

38. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run.”

— Herman Melville

39. “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

41. “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.”

— Herman Melville

42. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

— Herman Melville

43. “We cannot live for ourselves alone.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

47. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.”

— Herman Melville

48. “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

50. “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.”

— Herman Melville