Herman Melville Quotes

443 Sourced Quotes

At banquets surfeit not, but fill; partake, and retire; and eat not again till you crave.

Herman Melville
While nature thus very early and very abundantly feeds us, she is very late in tutoring us as to the proper methodization of our diet.

Herman Melville
The dinner-hour is the summer of the day: full of sunshine, I grant; but not like the mellow autumn of supper.

Herman Melville
I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.

Herman Melville
Whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Herman Melville
Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not understand, human nature.

Herman Melville
In physical chemistry, as in other sciences, progress usually occurs by a series of rather discontinuous steps separated by periods of consolidation. Thus certain topics and branches of a subject become popular fields of activity once the pioneering work has defined the field of endeavor. Thereafter papers flow in ever-increasing numbers.

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

Herman Melville
An indiscriminate distrust of human nature is the worst consequence of a miserable condition, whether brought about by innocence or guilt. And though want of suspicion more than want of sense, sometimes leads a man into harm; yet too much suspicion is as bad as too little sense.

Herman Melville
The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.

Herman Melville
The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

Herman Melville
But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.

Herman Melville
Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.

Herman Melville
Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty.

Herman Melville
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!

Herman Melville
Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be tomorrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy.

Herman Melville
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

Herman Melville
Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.

Herman Melville
What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

Herman Melville
And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

Herman Melville
The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.

Herman Melville
Nature is good Queen Bess; but who's responsible for the cholera?

Herman Melville
Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.

Herman Melville
It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.

Herman Melville
"Hold!" cried Media, "yonder is a curious rock. It looks black as a whale's hump in blue water, when the sun shines." "That must be the Isle of Fossils," said Mohi. "Ay, my lord, it is." "Let us land, then," said Babbalanja.

Herman Melville
In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.

Herman Melville
Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Herman Melville
Flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.

Herman Melville
The pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bearthe earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invokedfor favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

Herman Melville
It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha.

Herman Melville