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)
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.
No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks.
I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.
The invisible spheres were formed in fright.
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.
There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause.
The great art of telling truth is often to conceal it.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Contemporaries of Herman Melville
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Herman Melville (1819–1891).