Quotes from Herman Melville

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.

Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!

and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.

Where the deepest word ends, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.

I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar.

Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming?

see how elastic our swift prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

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 as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Over Descartian vortices you hover.

In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.

They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.

In truth, a mature man who uses hairoil, 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.

You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelegence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or instinct, or simply because he had been tuitored into it, or by any intermixture of all of these , even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb , sponteneous literal process.

the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods.

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.

My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

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.