Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head.”

— Herman Melville

302. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “Queequeg explained to me that his world was very different from ours. However, one thing he learned quickly, was that within all groups of people there are kind men and there are unkind men.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

316. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

319. “We cannibals must help these Christians.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Herman Melville

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

331. “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

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

— Herman Melville

333. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

336. “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

337. “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.”

— Herman Melville

338. “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

339. “Over Descartian vortices you hover.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Herman Melville

345. “How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.”

— Herman Melville

346. “For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

349. “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

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

— Herman Melville