Quotes from Herman Melville

Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours to civilize civilization and Christianize Christendom?

What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book. Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

Smiling is the chosen vehicle of ambiguities.

Even death may prove unreal at last and stoics be astounded into heaven. Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned, Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind. That like the crocus budding through the snow, that like a swimmer rising from the deep, that like a burning secret which doth go. Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep, emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea and prove that death but routs life into victory.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!

there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.

Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.

Once in a while, we came in at the death of a chief 's pig; the noise of whose slaughtering was generally to be heard at a great distance. An occasion like this gathers the neighbors together, and they have a bit of a feast, where a stranger is always welcome. A good loud squeal, therefore, was music in our ears. It showed something going on in that direction.

Quién puede trazar la línea donde termina el violeta y donde empieza el naranja en el arcoíris?

As his former ship moves off, Budd shouts, Good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.

Deviarmi? Voi non potete deviarmi. La via del mio fermo proposito è segnata da rotaie di ferro per correre sulle quali il mio spirito è scanalato. Su precipizi senza fondo, attraverso i cuori infestati dalle montagne, sotto i letti dei torrenti, io mi precipito infallibilmente. Nessun ostacolo c'è, nessun gomito su questa mia strada di ferro!

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

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

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

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.

War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim.

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

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

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.