Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate that; good man, and a pious; but.”

— Herman Melville

352. “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

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

— Herman Melville

354. “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

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

— Herman Melville

356. “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

357. “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

358. “The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

360. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

364. “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

365. “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

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. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “Art is the objectification of feeling.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

374. “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

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

— Herman Melville

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Herman Melville

384. “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

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. “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

387. “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

388. “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.”

— Herman Melville

389. “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

390. “And tell him to paint me a sign, with-no suicides permitted here, and no smloing in the parlor; might as well kill both birds at once.”

— Herman Melville

391. “The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.”

— Herman Melville

392. “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

393. “It’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep.”

— Herman Melville

394. “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

395. “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

396. “He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.”

— Herman Melville

397. “It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

399. “Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.”

— Herman Melville

400. “The only ugliness is that of the heart, seen through the face. And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible.”

— Herman Melville