Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Herman Melville

203. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

212. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

216. “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”

— Herman Melville

217. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Herman Melville

228. “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

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

— Herman Melville

230. “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

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

— Herman Melville

232. “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

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

— Herman Melville

234. “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

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

— Herman Melville

236. “Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.”

— Herman Melville

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Herman Melville

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.”

— Herman Melville

245. “Genius is full of trash.”

— Herman Melville

246. “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

247. “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”

— Herman Melville

248. “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

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. “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