Quotes from Herman Melville

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

Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.

Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.

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

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.

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

None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.

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.

A beautiful woman is born Queen of men and women both, as Mary Stuart was born Queen of Scots, whether men or women.

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.

There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.

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

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

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.

I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.

The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.

Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'

A man can be honest in any sort of skin.

Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them.

Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.

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!