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)
No man can be a hero to his valet, nor to his wife.
All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence.
The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
He who has never failed to surmount a difficulty has never tried to.
The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Moby Dick.
I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head!
The sea is a grand, an ennobling, and a most instructive object.
It is not the eye that sees, but the soul.
To be true to the game, you must be true to yourself.
The intensest atom of aether is not more spiritual than a mote of dust.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes to himself the notion that these individual phenomena are but the visible tokens of some secret spiritualized philosophy.
The world is a wedding feast, and the sea is the wine.
All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
What is it, what is it, that makes a man a man?
The sea is a wilderness of waves, a desert of water.
Humanity, thou art a changeful thing.
The world is a wheel, and it will turn.
There is no folly like the folly of the wise.
Contemporaries of Herman Melville
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Herman Melville (1819–1891).