Top 100 Quotes About Herman Melville
#1. Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Edward Dahlberg
#2. As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, "All mortal greatness is but disease.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#3. Herman Melville was supposed to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the train into New York and work for a bank. To be an artist, you have to say goodbye to your family.
Don McLean
#4. My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
John Irving
#5. You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
#6. I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.
Jess Walter
#8. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
Harold Bloom
#9. The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.
Victor LaValle
#10. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked."
Herman Melville
Peter Wortsman
#11. Or why you are wearing a picture of Santa Clause on you shirts, but-"
"It's Herman Melville.
Lemony Snicket
#12. The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
#13. The Middle East, that seductive region where [Herman] Melville had hoped to rekindle his inspiration and revive his diminishing career, had proved an egregious disappointment. "The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical," he groaned, "like all the rest of the world.
Michael B. Oren
#14. Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.
D.H. Lawrence
#15. Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.
Herman Melville
#16. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
Herman Melville
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.
Herman Melville
#21. 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
#22. The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,
the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.
Herman Melville
#23. Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
Herman Melville
#24. He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around my waist, and said henceforth we were married.
Herman Melville
#25. Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.
Herman Melville
#26. 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
#27. If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.
Herman Melville
#28. He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
Herman Melville
#29. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What
Herman Melville
#30. There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
Herman Melville
#31. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
Herman Melville
#32. That before living agent, now became the living instrument.
Herman Melville
#33. That one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Herman Melville
#34. Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
Herman Melville
#37. As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
Herman Melville
#38. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
Herman Melville
#39. Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.
Herman Melville
#40. He's no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
Herman Melville
#42. You would do well to turn from Chapter XXXVI to Chapter CXXXIII without further delay, thus saving nearly a hundred chapters without anybody's knowing the difference if you keep quiet. After all, Ahab isn't the only one entitled to be a skipper.
Richard Armour
#43. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up - flaked up, with rose-water snow.
Herman Melville
#44. 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
#45. The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius,
simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.
Herman Melville
#46. What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?
Herman Melville
#47. There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.
Herman Melville
#49. Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.
Herman Melville
#50. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score sir, how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will still be pricking him at time.
Herman Melville
#51. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Herman Melville
#52. 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
#53. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
Herman Melville
#54. Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?
Herman Melville
#55. There is mystery in everything," Herman whispered, almost to himself. "And so there is poetry in everything. Even something as monstrous as a whale. But how to unlock its poetry.
Mark Beauregard
#56. Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
Herman Melville
#57. To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Herman Melville
#58. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire.
Herman Melville
#59. At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
Herman Melville
#60. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Herman Melville
#62. The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
Herman Melville
#63. So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.
Herman Melville
#65. Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He
Herman Melville
#66. In those jaws of swift destruction, like another Jonah (by which name they indeed called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.
Herman Melville
#67. You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.
Herman Melville
#68. In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
Herman Melville
#69. That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
Herman Melville
#71. Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
Herman Melville
#72. 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
#73. I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
Herman Melville
#75. It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there.
Herman Melville
#76. Better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee,
Herman Melville
#77. Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.
Herman Melville
#78. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.
Herman Melville
#79. For few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action
Herman Melville
#80. Round the World! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Herman Melville
#81. I would be as free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books.
Herman Melville
#82. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.
Herman Melville
#83. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
Herman Melville
#84. We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.
Herman Melville
#85. Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes
Herman Melville
#86. Below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can
Herman Melville
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.
Herman Melville
#90. I've part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind?
Herman Melville
#91. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.
Herman Melville
#92. Of erections how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!
Herman Melville
#93. Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.
Herman Melville
#94. What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
Herman Melville
#95. While he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
Herman Melville
#96. In metropolitan cases, the love of the most single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object.
Herman Melville
#97. One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
Herman Melville
#98. 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
#99. Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
Herman Melville
#100. The truth was, I suppose, that a man of so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time.
Herman Melville
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