Quotes from Herman Melville

oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.

He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

Yet, after all, insensible as he is to a thousand wants, and removed from harassing cares, my not the savage be the happier man..?

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant—the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.

In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--/But the Year and the Man were gone. (The Armies of the Wilderness)

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.

if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

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.

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.

And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn

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

but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade

Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys.

At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom - the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow.

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!- lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?

For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

On Ralph Waldo Emerson)I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he don't attain the bottom, why all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.

I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.