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)
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?
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the highest wisdom is but the most exquisite folly.
Life is a voyage, and we are all in the same boat.
He who has never failed has never lived.
We are all of us, in this world, more or less, like Bartleby, the Scrivener.
It is better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.
The great God absolute! The center and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
And as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.
There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
I am like a man who has been treading on the hot embers of some infernal fire, and has at last reached a green spot, where he can stand and breathe.
A sense of unspeakable security is in me, and I feel that I am a man.
I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb.
I shall not go to heaven, I'm afraid, for I have been too much of a sailor.
Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.
I have no doubt that my book will be a failure, but I am not sorry that I wrote it.
I am a man who has lived among the cannibals, and I am not afraid of anything.
I have a strange feeling that I shall never write another book.
All men live enveloped in contingencies and perils.
Contemporaries of Herman Melville
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Herman Melville (1819–1891).