Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Herman Melville

160. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Herman Melville

169. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

173. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

176. “For every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it;.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

178. “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

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

— Herman Melville

180. “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

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

— Herman Melville

182. “Great towers take time to construct.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

188. “Immortality is but ubiquity in time.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Herman Melville

197. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville