Quotes from Herman Melville

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.

Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

The only ugliness is that of the heart, seen through the face. And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible.

But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

If I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably --why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work --for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into still subtler form.

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness

What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event—the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Thou great democratic God!… who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man upon his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region…. Meditation and water are wedded forever.

All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.