Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Herman Melville

254. “Father Mapple uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed to be kneeling at the bottom of the sea.”

— Herman Melville

255. “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

256. “The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.”

— Herman Melville

257. “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in.”

— Herman Melville

258. “God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.”

— Herman Melville

259. “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that.”

— Herman Melville

260. “Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God’s throne.”

— Herman Melville

261. “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

262. “Indolence is heaven ’s ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.”

— Herman Melville

263. “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

264. “Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! 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

265. “It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”

— Herman Melville

266. “Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. 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

267. “Love is both Creator’s and Saviour’s gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.”

— Herman Melville

268. “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! For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.”

— Herman Melville

269. “You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.”

— Herman Melville

270. “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.”

— Herman Melville

271. “A ship is a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king.”

— Herman Melville

272. “To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.”

— Herman Melville

273. “Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.”

— Herman Melville

274. “Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.”

— Herman Melville

275. “But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.”

— Herman Melville

276. “What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?”

— Herman Melville

277. “Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory – the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.”

— Herman Melville

278. “Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.”

— Herman Melville

279. “All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do – remember that – and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.”

— Herman Melville

280. “To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.”

— Herman Melville

281. “With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

— Herman Melville

282. “For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.”

— Herman Melville

283. “If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.”

— Herman Melville

284. “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.”

— Herman Melville

285. “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”

— Herman Melville

286. “It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

— Herman Melville

287. “The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.”

— Herman Melville

288. “Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.”

— Herman Melville

289. “The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head.”

— Herman Melville

290. “The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, – what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”

— Herman Melville

291. “For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner – for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.”

— Herman Melville

292. “No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

294. “Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.”

— Herman Melville

295. “The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.”

— Herman Melville

296. “In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their lifetime aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.”

— Herman Melville

297. “Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.”

— Herman Melville

298. “The dinner-hour is the summer of the day: full of sunshine, I grant; but not like the mellow autumn of supper.”

— Herman Melville

299. “For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who “believe and tremble” has one.”

— Herman Melville

300. “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