Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.”

— Herman Melville

352. “For though I tried to move his arm – unlock his bridegroom clasp – yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.”

— Herman Melville

353. “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

354. “This slavery breeds ugly passions in man.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

— Herman Melville

361. “Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”

— Herman Melville

362. “All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque.”

— Herman Melville

363. “The lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fear of man.”

— Herman Melville

364. “But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the airs smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping?”

— Herman Melville

365. “Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?”

— Herman Melville

366. “What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness?”

— Herman Melville

367. “Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.”

— Herman Melville

368. “The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone – Portent or promise – and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.”

— Herman Melville

369. “Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.”

— Herman Melville

370. “A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.”

— Herman Melville

371. “Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?”

— Herman Melville

372. “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”

— Herman Melville

373. “Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”

— Herman Melville

374. “But when a man suspects any wrong it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think nothing.”

— Herman Melville

375. “He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.”

— Herman Melville

376. “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

377. “But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.”

— Herman Melville

378. “Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.”

— Herman Melville

379. “It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there.”

— Herman Melville

380. “By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous comment on the white stranger’s thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded.”

— Herman Melville

381. “The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

— Herman Melville

382. “Art is the objectification of feeling.”

— Herman Melville

383. “We talk of the Turks, and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them, go to heaven, before some of us?”

— Herman Melville

384. “Of the quaking recruit, three pitched battles make a grim grenadier; and he who shrank from the muzzle of a cannon, is now ready to yield his mustache for a sponge.”

— Herman Melville

385. “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

— Herman Melville

386. “Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.”

— Herman Melville

387. “The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.”

— Herman Melville

388. “There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.”

— Herman Melville

389. “Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”

— Herman Melville

390. “For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

— Herman Melville

391. “Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?”

— Herman Melville

392. “As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one’s soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.”

— Herman Melville

393. “Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved.”

— Herman Melville

394. “Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.”

— Herman Melville

395. “In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.”

— Herman Melville

396. “So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way.”

— Herman Melville

397. “Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served.”

— Herman Melville

398. “Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the million miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true – not true, or undeveloped.”

— Herman Melville

399. “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw?”

— Herman Melville

400. “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

— Herman Melville