Quotes from Herman Melville

Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.

if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

But, indeed, dull, dreary adversity was now in store for him; and adversity, come it at eighteen or eighty, is the true old age of man.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster — tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

Thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man [...] I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit.

Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. 

No hay sitio como una cama para las comunicaciones confidenciales (...) se abren allí mutuamente el fondo de las almas.

Ego non baptiso te in nomine...but make out the rest yourself.

Porque ningún hombre puede sentir bien su propia identidad si no es con los ojos cerrados; como si la tiniebla fuera efectivamente el elemento adecuado de nuestras esencias, aunque la luz sea mas afín a nuestra parte arcillosa.

Let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.

He loved books, never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact but of the best.

In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

Se ve qué elásticos se vuelven nuestro rígidos prejuicios una vez que viene a plegarlos el amor.

I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." "Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar!

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it — would they let me — since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore- announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.

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!

Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one;

Las cosas mas maravillosas son siempre las inexpresables.

how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.