Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

— Herman Melville

352. “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

353. “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

354. “It is plain and demonstrable, that much ale is not good for Yankee, and operates differently upon them from what it does upon a Briton; ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.”

— Herman Melville

355. “But war is pain, and hate is woe.”

— Herman Melville

356. “If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

358. “Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate that; good man, and a pious; but.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Herman Melville

363. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

366. “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

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

— Herman Melville

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Herman Melville

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Herman Melville

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “Art is the objectification of feeling.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “He loved books, never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact but of the best.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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