Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

154. “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

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

— Herman Melville

156. “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

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

— Herman Melville

158. “Great towers take time to construct.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Herman Melville

167. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

170. “Immortality is but ubiquity in time.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

174. “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

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

— Herman Melville

176. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

182. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

186. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

189. “A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ear I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

191. “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

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

— Herman Melville

193. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

196. “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it.”

— Herman Melville

197. “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.”

— Herman Melville

198. “Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. “I would prefer not to quit you”, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.”

— Herman Melville

199. “Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.”

— Herman Melville

200. “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