Quotes from Herman Melville

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks… strike, strike through the mask!

Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fretFor aught that waneth here below.Let go, let go!

Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

A man with some evil design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden?

And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

The poor old Past,The Future's slave.

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.

God bless Captain Vere!

And what is it, thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg -- a cozy, loving pair.

Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes the whole universe for a vast practical joke.

There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.

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

We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.

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

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

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

I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.