Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

153. “Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”

— Herman Melville

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Herman Melville

158. “Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.”

— Herman Melville

159. “You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world... We are not a nation, so much as a world.”

— Herman Melville

160. “Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.”

— Herman Melville

161. “An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.”

— Herman Melville

162. “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

— Herman Melville

163. “We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.”

— Herman Melville

164. “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs.”

— Herman Melville

165. “Implacable I, the implacable Sea; Implacable most when most I smile serene- Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.”

— Herman Melville

166. “The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!”

— Herman Melville

167. “Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

— Herman Melville

168. “Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?” “For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself, man. Here are my razors – the best of steel; here, and make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”

— Herman Melville

169. “Great towers take time to construct.”

— Herman Melville

170. “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?”

— Herman Melville

171. “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!”

— Herman Melville

172. “The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? – Because one did survive the wreck.”

— Herman Melville

173. “The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.”

— Herman Melville

174. “The easiest way of life is the best.”

— Herman Melville

175. “Immortality is but ubiquity in time.”

— Herman Melville

176. “Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.”

— Herman Melville

177. “This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”

— Herman Melville

178. “Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.”

— Herman Melville

179. “We become sad in the first place because we have nothing stirring to do.”

— Herman Melville

180. “The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”

— Herman Melville

181. “There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.”

— Herman Melville

182. “There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.”

— Herman Melville

183. “Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor.”

— Herman Melville

184. “Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand.”

— Herman Melville

185. “Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.”

— Herman Melville

186. “That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.”

— Herman Melville

187. “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

— Herman Melville

188. “A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”

— Herman Melville

189. “Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.”

— Herman Melville

190. “A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”

— Herman Melville

191. “And the visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”

— Herman Melville

192. “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

— Herman Melville

193. “Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.”

— Herman Melville

194. “Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”

— Herman Melville

195. “Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.”

— Herman Melville

196. “In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary?”

— Herman Melville

197. “Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.”

— Herman Melville

198. “Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?”

— Herman Melville

199. “An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.”

— Herman Melville

200. “My body is but the lees of my better being.”

— Herman Melville