Herman Melville Quotations

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

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

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.

The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

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

Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.

Grub, ho! now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run

To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee

This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with ourfellowmen? and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run ascauses, and they come back to us as effects.

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

So philosophers so throughly comprehend us as horses.

No utter surprise can come to him Who reaches Shakespeare's core; That which we seek and shun is there - Man's final lore

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I will go to it laughing.

We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.

There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.

That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.

The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.

I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination.

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.

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

The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

The further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does "fame" become, especially of the literary sort. This species of "fame" a waggish acquaintance says can be manufactured to order, and sometimes is so manufactured.

Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.

To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.

When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.

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

In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.

The result of civilization, at the Sandwich Islands and elsewhere, is found productive to the civilizers, destructive to the civilizees. It is said to be compensation--a very philosophical word; but it appears to be very much on the principle of the old game, "You lose, I win": good philosophy for the winner.

When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the "big canoe" of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.

Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe.

Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

The grand principles of virtue and honor, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same the world over: and wherethese principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

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.

All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque.

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?

Prayer draws us near to our own souls.

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

He says NO! In thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps-often but old bottles and vials, though. ... He burns, too, the purest of oil. ... It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveler on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.

We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.

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.

The eyes are the gateway to the soul.

All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.