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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— 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. “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

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

— Herman Melville

413. “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

414. “Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.”

— Herman Melville

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Herman Melville

419. “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

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

— Herman Melville

421. “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

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

— Herman Melville

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

431. “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

432. “Aid my disillusionment, my friend!”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Herman Melville

440. “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

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

— Herman Melville

442. “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

443. “Fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.”

— Herman Melville

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

— Herman Melville

445. “Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn.”

— Herman Melville

446. “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

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

— Herman Melville

448. “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

449. “Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion – most seen here at the Equator – denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.”

— Herman Melville

450. “To certain temperaments, especially when previously agitated by any deep feeling, there is perhaps nothing more exasperating, andwhich sooner explodes all self-command, than the coarse, jeering insolence of a porter, cabman, or hack-driver.”

— Herman Melville