Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.”

— Herman Melville

452. “To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.”

— Herman Melville

453. “And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a.”

— Herman Melville

454. “The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius, – simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.”

— 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. “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

457. “Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

463. “Now, as I before hinted, 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.”

— Herman Melville

464. “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

— Herman Melville

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “We die, because we live.”

— Herman Melville

469. “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

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

— Herman Melville

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

478. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Herman Melville

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Herman Melville

484. “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

485. “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.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

488. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

494. “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

495. “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

496. “He 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.”

— Herman Melville

497. “Every heart is ice-bound till wine melt it, and reveal the tender grass and sweet herbage budding below, with every dear secret, hidden before like a dropped jewel in a snow-bank, lying there unsuspected through winter till spring.”

— Herman Melville

498. “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

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

— Herman Melville

500. “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