Herman Melville quotes Born: 08/01/1819 Died: 09/28/1891 Country: usa

• 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. (Herman Melville) [men/willpower]
• If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid. (Herman Melville) [books/sale/facts/dreams]
• Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land. (Herman Melville) [america/excellence/land]
• Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. (Herman Melville) [faith]
• He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. (Herman Melville)
• Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. (Herman Melville) [look/human/sky/god]
• For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. (Herman Melville) [words/books]
• They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure. (Herman Melville) [leisure]
• 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. (Herman Melville) [death/misfortune/willpower]
• Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity. (Herman Melville)
• I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. (Herman Melville) [feeling]
• The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. (Herman Melville) [brain]
• The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass. (Herman Melville) [consciousness/being/being/reality]
• He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. (Herman Melville)
• But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. (Herman Melville) [fail]
• Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory -- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended. (Herman Melville) [allegory/content/paper]
• Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, --for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it -- not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. (Herman Melville) [speak]
• 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. (Herman Melville) [help]
• 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. (Herman Melville) [wife/chat/morning]
• We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects. (Herman Melville) [men]
• Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. (Herman Melville) [age/life/death]
• A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. (Herman Melville)
• A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities. (Herman Melville)
• A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. (Herman Melville)
• At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect. (Herman Melville)
• Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. (Herman Melville)
• Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. (Herman Melville)
• Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth. (Herman Melville)
• 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. (Herman Melville)
• Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. (Herman Melville)
• I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge (Herman Melville)

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