Quotes By Herman Melville

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

Truth is in things, and not in words.

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

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

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

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

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

There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

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 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.

Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

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.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

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

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

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.

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.

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

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.