Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”

— Herman Melville

202. “Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.”

— Herman Melville

203. “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

204. “Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.”

— Herman Melville

205. “The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.”

— Herman Melville

206. “But the might-have-been is but boggy ground to build upon.”

— Herman Melville

207. “The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free.”

— Herman Melville

208. “I’m a demoniac; I am madness maddened.”

— Herman Melville

209. “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

— Herman Melville

210. “Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!”

— Herman Melville

211. “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.”

— Herman Melville

212. “Let us only hate hatred; and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.”

— Herman Melville

213. “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around my waist, and said henceforth we were married.”

— Herman Melville

214. “Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.”

— Herman Melville

215. “Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled.”

— Herman Melville

216. “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.”

— Herman Melville

217. “The world’s a ship on its voyage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”

— Herman Melville

218. “And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.”

— Herman Melville

219. “The truth was, I suppose, that a man of so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time.”

— Herman Melville

220. “When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”

— Herman Melville

221. “You cannot hide the soul.”

— Herman Melville

222. “His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity whensoever possible with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.”

— Herman Melville

223. “Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.”

— Herman Melville

224. “However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity.”

— Herman Melville

225. “In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.”

— Herman Melville

226. “A mantrap may be under his ruddy-tipped daisies.”

— Herman Melville

227. “Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage – and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.”

— Herman Melville

228. “Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.”

— Herman Melville

229. “Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.”

— Herman Melville

230. “A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.”

— Herman Melville

231. “Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.”

— Herman Melville

232. “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

233. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.”

— Herman Melville

234. “Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?”

— Herman Melville

235. “Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent.”

— Herman Melville

236. “When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.”

— Herman Melville

237. “Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after.”

— Herman Melville

238. “I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.”

— Herman Melville

239. “Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”

— Herman Melville

240. “Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.”

— Herman Melville

241. “There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.”

— Herman Melville

242. “Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.”

— Herman Melville

243. “Genius is full of trash.”

— Herman Melville

244. “And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there i still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

— Herman Melville

245. “And as for going as cook, – though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on shipboard – yet, somehow, 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

246. “In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of Earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us – I too have a hand here. The.”

— Herman Melville

247. “The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges...”

— Herman Melville

248. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all 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...”

— Herman Melville

249. “There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.”

— Herman Melville

250. “There’s something ever egotistical in mountain tops and towers, and all things grand and lofty.”

— Herman Melville