Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Herman Melville

303. “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

304. “The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course – its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”

— Herman Melville

305. “We cannibals must help these Christians.”

— Herman Melville

306. “The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

308. “What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

310. “But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical.”

— Herman Melville

311. “But indeed, nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless.”

— Herman Melville

312. “Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.”

— Herman Melville

313. “That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.”

— Herman Melville

314. “Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? This Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet it is bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzling confounds. ‘Tis Iron – that I know – not gold.”

— Herman Melville

315. “From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.”

— Herman Melville

316. “He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.”

— Herman Melville

317. “If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.”

— Herman Melville

318. “And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.”

— Herman Melville

319. “Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”

— Herman Melville

320. “In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.”

— Herman Melville

321. “Some certain significance lurk in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.”

— Herman Melville

322. “He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.”

— Herman Melville

323. “Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.”

— Herman Melville

324. “For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; – nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

— Herman Melville

325. “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life.”

— Herman Melville

326. “Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there.”

— Herman Melville

327. “There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.”

— Herman Melville

328. “It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow.”

— Herman Melville

329. “Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.”

— Herman Melville

330. “Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.”

— Herman Melville

331. “No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping.”

— Herman Melville

332. “There is a woe that is wisdom, a woe that is madness.”

— Herman Melville

333. “At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom – the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow.”

— Herman Melville

334. “I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, no matter how comical.”

— Herman Melville

335. “Everyone knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything cooly is to do it genteelly.”

— Herman Melville

336. “In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.”

— Herman Melville

337. “Over Descartian vortices you hover.”

— Herman Melville

338. “Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.”

— Herman Melville

339. “Doesn’t the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil?”

— Herman Melville

340. “None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.”

— Herman Melville

341. “In our own hearts, we mold the whole world’s hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.”

— Herman Melville

342. “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

343. “It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”

— Herman Melville

344. “There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.”

— Herman Melville

345. “Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.”

— Herman Melville

346. “I would be as free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.”

— Herman Melville

347. “While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.”

— Herman Melville

348. “The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up – flaked up, with rose-water snow.”

— Herman Melville

349. “I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.”

— Herman Melville

350. “The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other’s superscriptions.”

— Herman Melville