Herman Melville Quotes

443 Sourced Quotes

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Herman Melville
Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.

Herman Melville
The earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.

Herman Melville
There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.

Herman Melville
Of all insults, the temporary condescension of a master to a slave is the most outrageous and galling. That potentate who most condescends, mark him well; for that potentate, if occasion come, will prove your uttermost tyrant.

Herman Melville
Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.

Herman Melville
People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.

Herman Melville
Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.

Herman Melville
He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.

Herman Melville
The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.

Herman Melville
Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

Herman Melville
It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.

Herman Melville
In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.

Herman Melville
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days of summer, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.

Herman Melville
To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.

Herman Melville
There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.

Herman Melville
O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

Herman Melville
What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?

Herman Melville
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail the forbidden seas.

Herman Melville
He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.

Herman Melville
It's too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is set on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.

Herman Melville
When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.

Herman Melville
What is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water?

Herman Melville