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)
The sea, though it be a highway, is a lonely one.
To be a man of the world, you must be a man of no world.
Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
Better to be a dog and bay the moon than such a man.
A man might as well be a whale as a man, if he's going to be a fool.
All mortal greatness is but disease.
The world is a joke, but it's a good one.
Better to be a fool than a knave.
The sea is a silent, solemn world.
Man's a wolf to man.
The profoundest wisdom is the profoundest folly.
A man might as well be a fish as a man, if he's going to be a fool.
The sea is a grand, solemn, and eternal thing.
It is not the eye that sees, but the mind.
All men are fools, and he who knows it is the wisest of them all.
Better to be a live dog than a dead lion.
The sea is a vast, mysterious, and unfathomable thing.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
A man's a man, but a whale's a whale, and a whale's a better man than a man.
Contemporaries of Herman Melville
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Herman Melville (1819–1891).