Quotes By Herman Melville

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.

There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

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.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.

Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.