Quotes from Herman Melville

For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants.

fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung

I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.

no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.

What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest come in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.

I would be as free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books.

In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads;

it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time);

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.

There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fair mindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.

in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.

Skuta var topptung som en middagsløs student med hodet fullt av Aristoteles.

Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.

What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

Queequeg estaba convencido de que si un hombre estaba decidido a vivir, la enfermedad nunca sería capaz de matarlo y que lo único que podía acabar con su vida era una ballena, una tempestad o cualquier otra fuerza violenta, destructiva e inmanejable de esa naturaleza.

for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action

Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup.

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other;

hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.

A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.

his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.