Quotes By Herman Melville

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

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

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

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 that have tried it.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.