Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, greatest American novel
Most quoted
"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; by all the world, as if some invisible tyrant were trying to drive me to a certain spot, and I, for all my resistance, could not choose but go?"
— from Moby Dick, 1851
"To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But to have been young Belshazzar, and not to have been haughty, but to have been a mere good-natured, joking boy, therein must have been a still more fine and subtile touch of earthly divineness."
— from Pierre, 1852
"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"
— from Moby Dick, 1851
All quotes by Herman Melville (234)
Call me Ishmael.
It is not down on any map; true places never are.
I try all things, I achieve what I can.
All men live enveloped in contingencies and not as insulated from them.
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Ahab's an old man, and a crazy man; and he's a grand, ungodly, god-like man.
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.
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.
Ignorance is the parent of fear.
We are all of us, in this world, more or less like Bartholemew Fair show-booths.
I would prefer not to.
Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
The world is a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage from one port to another.
Truth is in things, and not in words.
It is better to be a fool than to be dead.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.
The sea is a jovial comrade.
Contemporaries of Herman Melville
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Herman Melville (1819–1891).