Herman Melville Quotes (180 Quotes)

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

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

Call me Ishmael.

None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.

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.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

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

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

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.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

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

Ignorance is the parent of fear . . .

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

Grub, ho now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

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

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

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strangethan any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.

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.

Life is a voyage thats homeward bound.

Such men appal
The foe, though brave.

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

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

Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his he owns it . . .

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.