Quotes from Herman Melville

an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand; and never slept so sound before

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

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.

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

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

it is better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.

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.

to be hated cordially is only a left-handed compliment

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.

That over these sea pastures, wide rolling watery prairies, and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like some slumberers in their beds; the ever rolling waves but made so by the restlessness.

I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God?

But truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way.

The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life.

Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.

Nature cared not a jot.

Queequeg explained to me that his world was very different from ours. However, one thing he learned quickly, was that within all groups of people there are kind men and there are unkind men.

That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet.

art is the objectification of feeling

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.

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But 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. 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.