Herman Melville famous quotes

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Christian #Drinking

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
-- Herman Melville

#Poor #Feds #Criticize

If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
-- Herman Melville

#World #Dinner

An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
-- Herman Melville

#Fear #Men #Coward

Genius is full of trash.
-- Herman Melville

#Genius #Trash

Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing.
-- Herman Melville

#Fate #Laughing

The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head
-- Herman Melville

#Games #Long #Sailing

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

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.
-- Herman Melville

#Life #Sympathy #Beautiful

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
-- Herman Melville

#Water #Meditation

Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
-- Herman Melville

#Brother #Ocean #Sea

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Life #Spiritual

I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
-- Herman Melville

#Believe #Men #Thinking

I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
-- Herman Melville

#Christian #Kindness #Trying

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
-- Herman Melville

#Greatness #Men #Tests

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Knowledge #Learning

A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Writing #Men

But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
-- Herman Melville

#Heart #Law #Long

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
-- Herman Melville

#College #Yale #Whales

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Writing #Produce

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

#Reality #Quality #World

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
-- Herman Melville

#Travel #Adventure #Land

A chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving the host of the God of War--Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.
-- Herman Melville

#War #Would Be #Purpose

Did all the lets and bars appear To every just or larger end, Whence should come the trust and cheer? Youth must its ignorant impulse lend-- Age finds place in the rear. All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state
-- Herman Melville

#Cheer #War #Boys

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
-- Herman Melville

#Work #Politics #Leisure

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
-- Herman Melville

#Noble #Crafts #Melancholy

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

#Running #Hands #Circles

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
-- Herman Melville

#Art #Lying #White

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.
-- Herman Melville

#Strength #Way #Faults

Truth is in things, and not in words.
-- Herman Melville

#Truth Is

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
-- Herman Melville

#Sympathy #Firsts #Strange

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
-- Herman Melville

#Heart #Men #Your Side

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
-- Herman Melville

#Strong #Wall #Men

I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.
-- Herman Melville

#Thinking #Prejudice #Should

Ignorance is the parent of fear.
-- Herman Melville

#Fear #Healing #Ignorance

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.
-- Herman Melville

#Judgement #Missionary #Enlightened

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Cash #May

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

#Running #Iron #Soul

When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
-- Herman Melville

#Beauty #Ocean #Heart

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
-- Herman Melville

#Past #Tyrants #Wife

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

#Dream #Hurt #Book

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, a rather too scarce a good thing.
-- Herman Melville

#Laughter #Laughing #Good Things

truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
-- Herman Melville

#Long #Quality #World

Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
-- Herman Melville

#Dream #Blessing #Whales

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.
-- Herman Melville

#Life And Love #Hate #Heart

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
-- Herman Melville

#Men #Doubt #Atheism

And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.
-- Herman Melville

#Eye #Men #Fog

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

#Nature #Travel #Home

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
-- Herman Melville

#Thinking #Wind #Sea

And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.
-- Herman Melville

#Men #Skins #Honest

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

#Order #Literature #Method

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
-- Herman Melville

#Literature

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.
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Writing #Fleas

I try all things, I achieve what I can.
-- Herman Melville

#Trying #Achieve

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Men #Literature

Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
-- Herman Melville

#Stars #Monsters #Gliding

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
-- Herman Melville

#Laughter #Adventure #Laughing

Honor lies in the mane of a horse.
-- Herman Melville

#Horse #Lying #Honor

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
-- Herman Melville

#Years #Long #Mind

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

#Horse #Forever #Special

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
-- Herman Melville

#Dog #Horse #Philosopher

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Life #Travel

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
-- Herman Melville

#Depression #Strong #Hands

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
-- Herman Melville

#Morning #Couple #Lying

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

#Sweet #Sea #Soul

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
-- Herman Melville

#Happiness #Smile #Laughter

Failure is the true test of greatness
-- Herman Melville

#Greatness #Tests

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.
-- Herman Melville

#Stars #Moving #Heart

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

#Love #Friendship #Sight

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

#Hope #Struggle #Soul

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

#Communication #Men #Thinking

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

#Beautiful #Lying #Reality

For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, itis one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod--no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heart-burnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off--none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity.
-- Herman Melville

#Death #Sleep #Heart

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

#Purpose #News #Literature