Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

105. “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

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

— Herman Melville

107. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Herman Melville

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Herman Melville

118. “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

119. “Nature is nobody’s ally.”

— Herman Melville

120. “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

121. “All truth is profound.”

— Herman Melville

122. “We die of too much life.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

124. “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

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

— Herman Melville

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Herman Melville

140. “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

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

— Herman Melville

142. “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

143. “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”

— Herman Melville

144. “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate – Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate.”

— Herman Melville

145. “Honor lies in the mane of a horse.”

— Herman Melville

146. “Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?”

— Herman Melville

147. “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.”

— Herman Melville

148. “One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocence self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.”

— Herman Melville

149. “There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.”

— Herman Melville

150. “Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

— Herman Melville