Quotes from Herman Melville

Aid my disillusionment, my friend!

A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

Implacable I, the implacable Sea; Implacable most when most I smile serene- Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.

There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.

Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

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.

It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.

We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.

Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

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.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Great towers take time to construct.

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.

The easiest way of life is the best.