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Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. -- Herman Melville
I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes! -- Herman Melville
In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on. -- Herman Melville
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! -- Herman Melville
But indeed, nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless. -- Herman Melville
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. -- Herman Melville
It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he's bound to hell. -- Herman Melville
He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea. -- Herman Melville
Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. -- Herman Melville
It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. -- Herman Melville
All mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners
miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy. -- Herman Melville
And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? -- Herman Melville
In those jaws of swift destruction, like another Jonah (by which name they indeed called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. -- Herman Melville
Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam bellies 'till dey bust - and den die -- Herman Melville
An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward. -- Herman Melville
Though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it -- Herman Melville
Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. -- Herman Melville
Even though white is often associated with things, that are pleasant and pure, there is a peculiar emptiness about the color white. It is the emptiness of the white that is more disturbing, than even the bloodiness of red. -- Herman Melville
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking. -- Herman Melville
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters. -- Herman Melville
We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. -- Herman Melville
They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business. -- Herman Melville
While he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead. -- Herman Melville
For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merrymakings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. -- Herman Melville
When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves? -- Herman Melville
Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard. -- Herman Melville
See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them. -- Herman Melville
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand! -- Herman Melville
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days of summer, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. -- Herman Melville
Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang! -- Herman Melville
Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. -- Herman Melville
The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,
the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims. -- Herman Melville
Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face - at least to my taste - his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; -- Herman Melville
Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day. -- Herman Melville
That's the word, Turkey," said I - "that's it." "Oh, prefer? oh yes - queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer - " "Turkey," interrupted I, "you will please withdraw." "Oh certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should. -- Herman Melville
Nameless miseries of the numberless mortals -- Herman Melville
Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. -- Herman Melville
There is a woe that is wisdom, a woe that is madness. -- Herman Melville
The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass. -- Herman Melville
Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. -- Herman Melville
For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself? -- Herman Melville
I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. -- Herman Melville
But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. -- Herman Melville
Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. -- Herman Melville
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. -- Herman Melville
As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage. -- Herman Melville
Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues. -- Herman Melville
You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world ... We are not a nation, so much as a world. -- Herman Melville
The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius,
simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. -- Herman Melville
though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; -- Herman Melville
Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. -- Herman Melville
It is against the will of God that the East should be Christianized. -- Herman Melville
Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. -- Herman Melville
Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? This Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet it is bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzling confounds. 'Tis Iron - that I know - not gold. -- Herman Melville
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
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. -- Herman Melville
The dinner-hour is the summer of the day: full of sunshine, I grant; but not like the mellow autumn of supper. -- Herman Melville
As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral. -- Herman Melville
In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own. -- Herman Melville
Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death. -- Herman Melville
Such events cannot be ignored, but there is a considerate way of historically treating them. If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet. Though -- Herman Melville
If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul? -- Herman Melville
Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well. -- Herman Melville
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
The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself
who according to the Rabbins was also the first author
not being an original; the only original author being God. -- Herman Melville
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. -- Herman Melville
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
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them. -- Herman Melville
A ship is a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king. -- Herman Melville
Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises ... the best excellence in the children of any other land. -- Herman Melville
In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. -- Herman Melville
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood. -- Herman Melville
Standing navies, as well as standing armies, serve to keep alive the spirit of war even in the meek heart of peace. In its very embers and smoulderings, they nourish that fatal fire, and half-pay officers, as the priests of Mars, yet guard the temple, though no god be there. -- Herman Melville
Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it. -- Herman Melville
Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? -- Herman Melville
Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own. -- Herman Melville
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
If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. -- Herman Melville
Of the quaking recruit, three pitched battles make a grim grenadier; and he who shrank from the muzzle of a cannon, is now ready to yield his mustache for a sponge. -- Herman Melville
Father Mapple uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed to be kneeling at the bottom of the sea. -- Herman Melville
Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil? -- Herman Melville
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
Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. -- Herman Melville
Fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon - so like a corkscrew now - was flung -- Herman Melville
them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under -- Herman Melville
of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the -- Herman Melville
Morning to ye! Morning to ye! -- Herman Melville
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. -- Herman Melville
Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries - stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. -- Herman Melville
It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind. -- Herman Melville
1
These have been corrected in this EPUB3 edition. -- Herman Melville
Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? -- Herman Melville
What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. -- Herman Melville
But Captain Vere was now again motionless, standing absorbed in thought. Again starting, he vehemently exclaimed, Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet that angel must hang! -- Herman Melville
Leviathan is not the biggest fish; - I have heard of Krakens. -- Herman Melville
But truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way. -- Herman Melville
There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. -- Herman Melville
The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. -- Herman Melville
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. (moby dick chap 29 p123) -- Herman Melville
Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall. -- Herman Melville
How I snuffed that Tartar air!
how I spurned that turnpike earth!
that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. -- Herman Melville
In certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance. -- Herman Melville
I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense. -- Herman Melville
Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. -- Herman Melville
Let us only hate hatred; and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn. -- Herman Melville
All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering. -- Herman Melville
And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred. -- Herman Melville
Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. -- Herman Melville
I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. -- Herman Melville
ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands. -- Herman Melville
Everyone knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything cooly is to do it genteelly. -- Herman Melville
All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea -- Herman Melville
It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperborean winter scene. - It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. -- Herman Melville
The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the congregation of the dead. -- Herman Melville
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? - Because one did survive the wreck. -- Herman Melville
The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What -- Herman Melville
For the scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past; and the silent reminiscence of hardships departed is sweeter than the presence of delight. -- Herman Melville
Command the murderous chalices ... Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow
Death to Moby Dick! -- Herman Melville
You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing. -- Herman Melville
Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind. -- Herman Melville
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung. -- Herman Melville
And though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. -- Herman Melville
Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions. -- Herman Melville
One captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. -- Herman Melville
It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being just its arms. -- Herman Melville
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
If a drunkard in a sober fit is the dullest of mortals, an enthusiast in a reason-fit is not the most lively. And this, without prejudice to his greatly improved understanding; for, if his elation was the height of his madness, his despondency is but the extreme of his sanity. -- Herman Melville
All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets' forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth's sad ashes pain and falsehood grow. -- Herman Melville
Those who thought they best knew her, often wondered what happiness such a being could take in life, not considering the happiness which is to be had by some natures in the very easy way of simply causing pain to those around them. -- Herman Melville
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
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. -- Herman Melville
Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first. -- Herman Melville
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride. -- Herman Melville
If not against us, nature is not for us. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. -- Herman Melville
But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.
Because they have no memory ... because they are not human. -- Herman Melville
Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness -- Herman Melville
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. -- Herman Melville
But I shall follow the endless, winding way, - the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land. -- Herman Melville
He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his father the king on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening. -- Herman Melville
Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own. -- Herman Melville
A beautiful woman is born Queen of men and women both, as Mary Stuart was born Queen of Scots, whether men or women. -- Herman Melville
A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another. -- Herman Melville
It is a way I have of driving off the spleen -- Herman Melville
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
Bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. -- Herman Melville
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
While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. -- Herman Melville
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters. -- Herman Melville
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
Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate! -- Herman Melville
The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love. -- Herman Melville
But thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders. -- Herman Melville
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep. -- Herman Melville
Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. -- Herman Melville
Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien. -- Herman Melville
Some certain significance lurk in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way. -- Herman Melville
And especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, -- Herman Melville
Better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, -- Herman Melville
The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature. -- Herman Melville
Thy silence, then that voices thee. -- Herman Melville
But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. -- Herman Melville
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. -- Herman Melville
It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. -- Herman Melville
Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories. Now, -- Herman Melville
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeve of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost. -- Herman Melville
There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable. -- Herman Melville
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols. -- Herman Melville
When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! -- Herman Melville
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants. -- Herman Melville
Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions. -- Herman Melville
blow your trump - blister your lungs! - Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream! -- Herman Melville
But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. -- Herman Melville
for immortality is but ubiquity in time -- Herman Melville
In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command. -- Herman Melville
Tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. -- Herman Melville
Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings. -- Herman Melville
The truth was, I suppose, that a man of so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time. -- Herman Melville
What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! -- Herman Melville
I'm a demoniac; I am madness maddened -- Herman Melville
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. -- Herman Melville
If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet. -- Herman Melville
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
There she blows!-there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick! -- Herman Melville
Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. -- Herman Melville
Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! -- Herman Melville
I tell you, the sperm will stand no nonsense. -- Herman Melville
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, -- Herman Melville
Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition. -- Herman Melville
Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. -- Herman Melville
Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. -- Herman Melville
Is it possible, after all, that in spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, can not resolve? -- Herman Melville
Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty. -- Herman Melville
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
go on a whaling voyage; this -- Herman Melville
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures. -- Herman Melville
Thus mysterious divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one Bay to it; seems heart-beating heart of earth. -- Herman Melville
War yet shall be, but warriors are now operatives; war's made less grand than peace. -- Herman Melville
What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? -- Herman Melville
Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Ah! how cheerfully we cosign ourselves to perdition! -- Herman Melville
But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the airs smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? -- Herman Melville
So with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, -- Herman Melville
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
Honor lies in the mane of a horse. -- Herman Melville
Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. -- Herman Melville
As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light. -- Herman Melville
Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful. -- Herman Melville
I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. -- Herman Melville
Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! -- Herman Melville
A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon. -- Herman Melville
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. -- Herman Melville
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. -- Herman Melville
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff! -- Herman Melville
War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character. -- Herman Melville
That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. -- Herman Melville
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
the king of kind hearts and polite fellows -- Herman Melville
The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne. -- Herman Melville
Round the World! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us. -- Herman Melville
As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, -- Herman Melville
The eyes are the gateway to the soul. -- Herman Melville
The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance. -- Herman Melville
Yes, I have heard something curious on that score sir, how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will still be pricking him at time. -- Herman Melville
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. -- Herman Melville
We talk of the Turks, and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them, go to heaven, before some of us? -- Herman Melville
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. -- Herman Melville
Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember. -- Herman Melville
Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. -- Herman Melville
Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author. -- Herman Melville
Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! -- Herman Melville
For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. -- Herman Melville
Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. -- Herman Melville
Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny. -- Herman Melville
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh, -- Herman Melville
But lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; -- Herman Melville
By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward. Aye, -- Herman Melville
We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below. -- Herman Melville
If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. -- Herman Melville
True places are not found on maps. -- Herman Melville
Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. -- Herman Melville
this whale carries the everlasting mail! -- Herman Melville
What was sad in the world he did not superficially gainsay; what was glad in it he did not cynically slur; and all which was to him personally enjoyable, he gratefully took to his heart. -- Herman Melville
Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. -- Herman Melville
Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead? -- Herman Melville
What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more. -- Herman Melville
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate
Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate. -- Herman Melville
How I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast. -- Herman Melville
His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity whensoever possible with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters. -- Herman Melville
There is an aesthetics in all things. -- Herman Melville
in coat, heart, body, and brain; -- Herman Melville
5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR What's that I saw - lightning? Yes. SPANISH SAILOR No; Daggoo showing his teeth. -- Herman Melville
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
For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. -- Herman Melville
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
My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. -- Herman Melville
Go mad I cannot: I maintain
The perilous outpost of the sane. -- Herman Melville
Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure. -- Herman Melville
Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me. "I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker. -- Herman Melville
A gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; -- Herman Melville
I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. -- Herman Melville
[ ... ] and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly. -- Herman Melville
Here some one thrust these cards into these old hands of mine, swears that I must play them, and no others. And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right, live in the game, and die in it. -- Herman Melville
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of
its features from behind the unreasoning mask. -- Herman Melville
Only the man who says no is free -- Herman Melville
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone? -- Herman Melville
Oh! thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear! -- Herman Melville
In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. -- Herman Melville
I would be as free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. -- Herman Melville
It is not down on any map; true places never are. -- Herman Melville
The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. -- Herman Melville
Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth. -- Herman Melville
While nature thus very early and very abundantly feeds us, she is very late in tutoring us as to the proper methodization of our diet. -- Herman Melville
In this world, headwinds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim). -- Herman Melville
[N]ot only is the most marvellous event in this book collaborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages. -- Herman Melville
So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature. -- Herman Melville
Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. -- Herman Melville
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, a rather too scarce a good thing. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled. -- Herman Melville
The appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea. -- Herman Melville
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. -- Herman Melville
But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do
remember that
and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists. -- Herman Melville
I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God? -- Herman Melville
Who ain't a slave? -- Herman Melville
Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space. -- Herman Melville
Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing. -- Herman Melville
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage - and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope. -- Herman Melville
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical, -- Herman Melville
Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse. -- Herman Melville
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad. -- Herman Melville
The pleasure of leaving home, care-free, with no concern but to enjoy, has also as a pendant the pleasure of coming back to the old hearthstone, the home to which, however traveled, the heart still fondly turns, ignoring the burden of its anxieties and cares. -- Herman Melville
Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan. -- Herman Melville
The easiest way of life is the best. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. -- Herman Melville
He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation. -- Herman Melville
There is a delicacy in it equalled only by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk. -- Herman Melville
True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
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
In fact, tell him I've diddled him, and perhaps somebody else. -- Herman Melville
The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone
Portent or promise
and gives way To pale, meek Dawn. -- Herman Melville
He says NO! In thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. -- Herman Melville
Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that? -- Herman Melville
He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. -- Herman Melville
But the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade -- Herman Melville
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up - flaked up, with rose-water snow. -- Herman Melville
Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another. -- Herman Melville
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia. -- Herman Melville
Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod. -- Herman Melville
His mind swarmed with superstitious suspicions. -- Herman Melville
I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one. -- Herman Melville
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian. -- Herman Melville
If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. -- Herman Melville
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. -- Herman Melville
CHAPTER 64 Stubb's Supper -- Herman Melville
Youth must its ignorant impulse lend--
Age finds place in the rear.
All wars are boyish and are fought by boys -- Herman Melville
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
Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him. -- Herman Melville
But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. -- Herman Melville
might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Stay true to the dreams of thy youth. -- Herman Melville
Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence. -- Herman Melville
Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick! -- Herman Melville
All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. -- Herman Melville
But this whole world is a preposterous one, with many preposterous people in it. -- Herman Melville
What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? -- Herman Melville
An uncommon prudence is habtual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide. -- Herman Melville
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
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
Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. -- Herman Melville
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
The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. -- Herman Melville
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that. -- Herman Melville
Great towers take time to construct. -- Herman Melville
That one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM
that's bad -- Herman Melville
For I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool ... -- Herman Melville
Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by. -- Herman Melville
Youth is the time when hearts are large. -- Herman Melville
Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are. -- Herman Melville
A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true. -- Herman Melville
But what is worship? - to do the will of God - that is worship. And what is the will of God? - to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me - that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. -- Herman Melville
In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans. -- Herman Melville
The great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open ... -- Herman Melville
And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell. -- Herman Melville
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? -- Herman Melville
There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man. -- Herman Melville
Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. -- Herman Melville
If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth. -- Herman Melville
In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; -- Herman Melville
That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts. -- Herman Melville
The devil fetch ya, ya ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. -- Herman Melville
Let us pray that the great historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity. -- Herman Melville
Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute. -- Herman Melville
Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.' -- Herman Melville
What could be more full of meaning? - for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest come in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. -- Herman Melville
Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. -- Herman Melville
There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fair mindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan. -- Herman Melville
Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
That before living agent, now became the living instrument. -- Herman Melville
Instinct and study, love and hate;
Audacity-reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's heart,
To wrestle with the angel
Art. -- Herman Melville
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. -- Herman Melville
We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things ... -- Herman Melville
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener! -- Herman Melville
For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it. -- Herman Melville
[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. -- Herman Melville
The idea of Jehovah was born here ... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God. -- Herman Melville
We become sad in the first place because we have nothing stirring to do. -- Herman Melville
I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology. -- Herman Melville
Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves. -- Herman Melville
Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. -- Herman Melville
Nature is nobody's ally. -- Herman Melville
And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. -- Herman Melville
I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. -- Herman Melville
There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea. -- Herman Melville
The books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound by much. -- Herman Melville
Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? -- Herman Melville
The only real owner of anything is its commander; -- Herman Melville
Life's a voyage that's homeward bound. -- Herman Melville
You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in. -- Herman Melville
In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. -- Herman Melville
No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. -- Herman Melville
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. -- Herman Melville
The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all. -- Herman Melville
Speaking of bones recalls an ugly custom of theirs, now obsolete - that of making fish-hooks and gimlets out of those of their enemies. This beats the Scandinavians turning people's skulls into cups and saucers. But -- Herman Melville
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes -- Herman Melville
At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect. -- Herman Melville
All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. -- Herman Melville
In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? -- Herman Melville
Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich. -- Herman Melville
He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around my waist, and said henceforth we were married. -- Herman Melville
Beauty is like piety
you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed. -- Herman Melville
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
I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality -- Herman Melville
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil. -- Herman Melville
What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather. -- Herman Melville
When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom. -- Herman Melville
Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. -- Herman Melville
Thou hast but enraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man. -- Herman Melville
The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils. -- Herman Melville
Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate that; good man, and a pious; but -- Herman Melville
For though I tried to move his arm - unlock his bridegroom clasp - yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. -- Herman Melville
Nothing may help or heal While Amor incensed remembers wrong. -- Herman Melville
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time? -- Herman Melville
Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind. -- Herman Melville
In times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations. -- Herman Melville
In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery. -- Herman Melville
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. -- Herman Melville
When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast. -- Herman Melville
And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes. -- Herman Melville
Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side. -- Herman Melville
To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes. -- Herman Melville
I could ... see in Emerson ... that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. -- Herman Melville
One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds -- Herman Melville
Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow. -- Herman Melville
Ignorance is the parent of fear. -- Herman Melville
In metropolitan cases, the love of the most single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object. -- Herman Melville
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning. -- Herman Melville
Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the -- Herman Melville
It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it. -- Herman Melville
Where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost -- Herman Melville
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. -- Herman Melville
Flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home. -- Herman Melville
Wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, -- Herman Melville
And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us. -- Herman Melville
Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee. -- Herman Melville
Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. -- Herman Melville
... for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown -- Herman Melville
Implacable I, the implacable Sea; Implacable most when most I smile serene- Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me. -- Herman Melville
Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um! -- Herman Melville
Usher - threadbare -- Herman Melville
Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it. -- Herman Melville
The fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods. -- Herman Melville
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. -- Herman Melville
This slavery breeds ugly passions in man. -- Herman Melville
There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland. -- Herman Melville
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. -- Herman Melville
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. -- Herman Melville
A whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. -- Herman Melville
The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included. -- Herman Melville
Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He -- Herman Melville
Of erections how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale! -- Herman Melville
Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left - that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated. -- Herman Melville
Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. -- Herman Melville
Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom? -- Herman Melville
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. -- Herman Melville
Hast seen the white whale? -- Herman Melville
To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous. -- Herman Melville
s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own. -- Herman Melville
What like a bullet can undeceive! -- Herman Melville
Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. -- Herman Melville
Yet, after all, insensible as he is to a thousand wants, and removed from harassing cares, my not the savage be the happier man..? -- Herman Melville
To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink. -- Herman Melville
Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. -- Herman Melville
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. -- Herman Melville
For there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. -- Herman Melville
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that 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
Love is profane, since it mortally reaches toward the heaven in ye! -- Herman Melville
An indiscriminate distrust of human nature is the worst consequence of a miserable condition, whether brought about by innocence or guilt. And though want of suspicion more than want of sense, sometimes leads a man into harm; yet too much suspicion is as bad as too little sense. -- Herman Melville
... as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through casual association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal- a hacked one. -- Herman Melville
It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite. -- Herman Melville
So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. -- Herman Melville
*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. -- Herman Melville
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities. -- Herman Melville
I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. -- Herman Melville
There was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. -- Herman Melville
I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. -- Herman Melville
Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. -- Herman Melville
One would like to know, what were foes made for except to be used? -- Herman Melville
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. -- Herman Melville
Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand. -- Herman Melville
There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. -- Herman Melville
Give him a good ducking, anyhow.
-But he'd crawl back.
Duck him again; and keep ducking him.
-Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though - yes, and drown you - what then? -- Herman Melville
Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins? -- Herman Melville
Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals. -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers. -- Herman Melville
At banquets surfeit not, but fill; partake, and retire; and eat not again till you crave. -- Herman Melville
They tell me sir, that Stubb did once desert poor Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye sir, as Stubb did him. -- Herman Melville
Wild rumours abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. -- Herman Melville
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue. -- Herman Melville
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. -- Herman Melville
For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;
nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown. -- Herman Melville
A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty. -- Herman Melville
Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans. -- Herman Melville
Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense. -- Herman Melville
War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim. -- Herman Melville
Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee! -- Herman Melville
There is all the different in the world between paying and being paid. -- Herman Melville
The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid
what will compare with it? -- Herman Melville
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
The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! -- Herman Melville
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. -- Herman Melville
Where the deepest word ends, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations. -- Herman Melville
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.
(Moby Dick Chapter lxxix p345) -- Herman Melville
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. -- Herman Melville
Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers - ambition and indigestion. -- Herman Melville
Youth is immortal; Tis the elderly only grow old! -- Herman Melville
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates. -- Herman Melville
Climate of Egypt in winter is the reign of spring upon earth, & summer in the air, and tranquility in the heat. -- Herman Melville
Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish? -- Herman Melville
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
Genius is full of trash. -- Herman Melville
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
The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. -- Herman Melville
Truth is in things, and not in words. -- Herman Melville
Contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love. -- Herman Melville
Below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can -- Herman Melville
It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha. -- Herman Melville
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
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. -- Herman Melville
When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing. -- Herman Melville
Failure is the true test of greatness -- Herman Melville
The terrors of truth and dart of death To faith alike are vain. -- Herman Melville
His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. -- Herman Melville
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
To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another. -- Herman Melville
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. -- Herman Melville
Niggards are oftentimes neat. -- Herman Melville
And tell him to paint me a sign, with-"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;" might as well kill both birds at once. -- Herman Melville
Yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. -- Herman Melville
You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic - especially toward the Fourth of July. -- Herman Melville
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. -- Herman Melville
Spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't ye spring, I say, all of ye - spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou -- Herman Melville
Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them. -- Herman Melville
Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after. -- Herman Melville
art is the objectification of feeling -- Herman Melville
Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. -- Herman Melville
We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged. -- Herman Melville
If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury; if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water. -- Herman Melville
Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but
happiness. -- Herman Melville
In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend. -- Herman Melville
Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve? -- Herman Melville
From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. -- Herman Melville
The United States wore empire on its brow -- Herman Melville
We die, because we live. -- Herman Melville
Will you, or will you not, quit me?' I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him.
'I would prefer not to quit you', he replied, gently emphasizing the not. -- Herman Melville
Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth. -- Herman Melville