Quotes by Herman Melville

• There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.
• There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
• There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
• There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
• There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.
• There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
• 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.
• There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
• 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.
• The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.
• 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.
• Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
• 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.
• Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.
• Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
• It is not down in any map; true places never are.
• There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.
• There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
• 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.
• There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
• They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
• To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.
• 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.
• Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
• Truth is in things, and not in words.
• 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.
• Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
• We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
• Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
• 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.
• Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
• At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
• Art is the objectification of feeling.
• A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
• A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
• A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
• Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
• It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
• It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
• He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
• Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
• Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
• Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
• I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
• 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.
• Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
• Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.
• It is better to fail in originality than succeed in imitation.
• Better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
• Success is not built on success, but on failure and frustration overcome time-nameless endeavor.