Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Herman Melville

210. “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

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

— Herman Melville

212. “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

213. “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

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. “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

216. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

226. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

229. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

237. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.”

— Herman Melville

244. “If in some cases a bit of a nautical Murat in setting forth his person ashore, the Handsome Sailor of the period in question evinced nothing of the dandified Billy-be-Dam, an amusing character all but extinct now, but occasionally to be encountered, and in a form yet more amusing than the original, at the tiller of the boats on the tempestuous Erie Canal or, more likely, vaporing in the groggeries along the towpath.”

— Herman Melville

245. “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

246. “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

247. “I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.”

— Herman Melville

248. “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

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

— Herman Melville

250. “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