Top 500 Herman Melville Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.”

— Herman Melville

402. “Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.”

— Herman Melville

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “This divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.”

— Herman Melville

408. “Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies!”

— Herman Melville

409. “Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.”

— Herman Melville

410. “Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.”

— Herman Melville

411. “A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into that watery immensity of terror, man’s private grief is lost like a drop.”

— Herman Melville

412. “Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.”

— Herman Melville

413. “Now, Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

— Herman Melville

414. “Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.”

— Herman Melville

415. “It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha.”

— Herman Melville

416. “Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.”

— Herman Melville

417. “In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.”

— Herman Melville

418. “Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden – what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!”

— Herman Melville

419. “In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes.”

— Herman Melville

420. “True places are not found on maps.”

— Herman Melville

421. “And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.”

— Herman Melville

422. “The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent.”

— Herman Melville

423. “Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.”

— Herman Melville

424. “An uncommon prudence is habtual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide.”

— Herman Melville

425. “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

426. “O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written – Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.”

— Herman Melville

427. “What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life’s Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.”

— Herman Melville

428. “Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.”

— Herman Melville

429. “Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.”

— Herman Melville

430. “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.”

— Herman Melville

431. “Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.”

— Herman Melville

432. “Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!”

— Herman Melville

433. “Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.”

— Herman Melville

434. “To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.”

— Herman Melville

435. “And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a.”

— Herman Melville

436. “He knows himself, and all that’s in him, who knows adversity.”

— Herman Melville

437. “When a companion’s heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.”

— Herman Melville

438. “Aid my disillusionment, my friend!”

— Herman Melville

439. “In truth, a mature man who uses hairoil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.”

— Herman Melville

440. “Of all insults, the temporary condescension of a master to a slave is the most outrageous and galling. That potentate who most condescends, mark him well; for that potentate, if occasion come, will prove your uttermost tyrant.”

— Herman Melville

441. “Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive aft.”

— Herman Melville

442. “In times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations.”

— Herman Melville

443. “We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.”

— Herman Melville

444. “Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!”

— Herman Melville

445. “But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!”

— Herman Melville

446. “At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand; and never slept so sound before.”

— Herman Melville

447. “All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter’s ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.”

— Herman Melville

448. “Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.”

— Herman Melville

449. “He’s no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!”

— Herman Melville

450. “There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fairmindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.”

— Herman Melville