Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

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

— Herman Melville

452. “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

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

— Herman Melville

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

460. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Herman Melville

467. “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

468. “Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”

— Herman Melville

469. “We die, because we live.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

475. “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

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

— Herman Melville

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

485. “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

486. “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

487. “Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented like geological sones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger footprints – the footprints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.”

— Herman Melville

488. “Fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

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

— Herman Melville

494. “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.”

— Herman Melville

495. “Away, and bring us napkins!”

— Herman Melville

496. “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

497. “So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.”

— Herman Melville

498. “But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth – pagans and all included – can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? – to do the will of God – that is worship. And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me – that is the will of God.”

— Herman Melville

499. “That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.”

— Herman Melville

500. “Traveling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash out of one’s purse.”

— Herman Melville