Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!”

— Herman Melville

452. “At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand; and never slept so sound before.”

— Herman Melville

453. “All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter’s ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.”

— Herman Melville

454. “Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.”

— Herman Melville

455. “He’s no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!”

— Herman Melville

456. “There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fairmindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.”

— Herman Melville

457. “Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.”

— Herman Melville

458. “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.”

— Herman Melville

459. “Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.”

— Herman Melville

460. “All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.”

— Herman Melville

461. “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.”

— Herman Melville

462. “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

— Herman Melville

463. “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.”

— Herman Melville

464. “The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.”

— Herman Melville

465. “Of all insults, the temporary condescension of a master to a slave is the most outrageous and galling. That potentate who most condescends, mark him well; for that potentate, if occasion come, will prove your uttermost tyrant.”

— Herman Melville

466. “In times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations.”

— Herman Melville

467. “We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.”

— Herman Melville

468. “Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!”

— Herman Melville

469. “It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

471. “Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places.”

— Herman Melville

472. “In man, breathing is incessantly going on – one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.”

— Herman Melville

473. “The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.”

— Herman Melville

474. “That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass.”

— Herman Melville

475. “That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true – not true, or undeveloped.”

— Herman Melville

476. “Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but – happiness.”

— Herman Melville

477. “Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the digestion!”

— Herman Melville

478. “While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.”

— Herman Melville

479. “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.”

— Herman Melville

480. “Though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

482. “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?”

— Herman Melville

483. “Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels.”

— Herman Melville

484. “We die, because we live.”

— Herman Melville

485. “If not against us, nature is not for us.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

487. “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.”

— Herman Melville

488. “Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.”

— Herman Melville

489. “Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.”

— Herman Melville

490. “To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

492. “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.”

— Herman Melville

493. “How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.”

— Herman Melville

494. “I had the whole road to myself, for no one was yet stirring, and I walked on, with a slouching, dogged gait. The gray shooting-jacket was on my back, and from the end of my brother’s rifle hung a small bundle of my clothes. My fingers worked moodily at the stock and trigger, and I thought that this indeed was the way to begin life, with a gun in your hand!”

— Herman Melville

495. “Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts.”

— Herman Melville

496. “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.”

— Herman Melville

497. “A book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

499. “Think of it. To go down to posterity as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals.’”

— Herman Melville

500. “And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.”

— Herman Melville