Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.”

— Herman Melville

102. “Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.”

— Herman Melville

103. “In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.”

— Herman Melville

104. “Delight, – top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.”

— Herman Melville

105. “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this.”

— Herman Melville

106. “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

— Herman Melville

107. “It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.”

— Herman Melville

108. “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

— Herman Melville

109. “In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

— Herman Melville

110. “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

111. “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”

— Herman Melville

112. “You cannot hide the soul.”

— Herman Melville

113. “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”

— Herman Melville

114. “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

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

— Herman Melville

116. “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

117. “Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, – for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it – not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

119. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

123. “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

124. “No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

128. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

131. “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

132. “What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness?”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “All truth is profound.”

— Herman Melville

138. “We die of too much life.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

140. “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

141. “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

142. “Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward – I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.”

— Herman Melville

143. “And so the universal thump is passed around.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

150. “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