Quotes from Herman Melville

It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

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.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.

For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, "I would prefer not to.

Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.

But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.

Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars!

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.

Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?

Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.

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.

for all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal...

Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!

But pity there was none. 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 merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.

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.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing--mores the pity.

It's a mutual, joint-stock world, all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.