Quotes from Herman Melville

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

But this whole world is a preposterous one, with many preposterous people in it.

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.

This slavery breeds ugly passions in man.

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.

In this world, headwinds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim).

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.

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. (Moby Dick; Chap 7 p36)

nameless miseries of the numberless mortals

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.

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?

If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life. As elsewhere, experience is the only guide here; but as no one man's experience can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it.

Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.

all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea

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.

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.

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.

But the might-have-been is but boggy ground to build upon.

Verily there is nothing new under the sun.

Queequeq, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?