Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “True Work is the necessity of poor humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.”

— Herman Melville

102. “You cannot hide the soul.”

— Herman Melville

103. “Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”

— Herman Melville

104. “Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

106. “Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.”

— Herman Melville

107. “Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?”

— Herman Melville

108. “A man can be honest in any sort of skin.”

— Herman Melville

109. “In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.”

— Herman Melville

110. “God is liberal of color; so should man be.”

— Herman Melville

111. “Meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

— Herman Melville

112. “Much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.”

— Herman Melville

113. “Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

— Herman Melville

114. “Truth is in things, and not in words.”

— Herman Melville

115. “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

— Herman Melville

116. “The devil fetch ya, ya ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep.”

— Herman Melville

117. “Youth is the time when hearts are large.”

— Herman Melville

118. “If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury; if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.”

— Herman Melville

119. “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.”

— Herman Melville

120. “And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”

— Herman Melville

121. “Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.”

— Herman Melville

122. “There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.”

— Herman Melville

123. “When the passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?”

— Herman Melville

124. “The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.”

— Herman Melville

125. “Nature is nobody’s ally.”

— Herman Melville

126. “Sharing the same blood with England, and yet her proved foe in two wars – not wholly inclined at bottom to forget an old grudge – intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations. Regarded in this indicatory.”

— Herman Melville

127. “All truth is profound.”

— Herman Melville

128. “We die of too much life.”

— Herman Melville

129. “Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

131. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.”

— Herman Melville

132. “Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.”

— Herman Melville

133. “Las cosas mas maravillosas son siempre las inexpresables.”

— Herman Melville

134. “Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.”

— Herman Melville

135. “All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.”

— Herman Melville

136. “Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

138. “Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.”

— Herman Melville

139. “There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.”

— Herman Melville

140. “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.”

— Herman Melville

141. “I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.”

— Herman Melville

142. “O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

— Herman Melville

143. “Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.”

— Herman Melville

144. “Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

— Herman Melville

145. “Chiamatemi Ismaele. Alcuni anni fa – non importa quanti esattamente – avendo pochi o punti denari in tasca e nulla di particolare che m’interessasse a terra, pensai di darmi alla navigazione e vedere la parte acquea del mondo. E’ un modo che ho io di cacciare la malinconia e di regolare la circolazione.”

— Herman Melville

146. “We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.”

— Herman Melville

147. “No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days of summer, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.”

— Herman Melville

148. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”

— Herman Melville

149. “The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.”

— Herman Melville

150. “Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.”

— Herman Melville