Herman Melville

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

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

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

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

Immortality is but ubiquity in time.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

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

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.

The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.

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

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

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

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

There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

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

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

Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.

Real strength never impairs beauty of harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.

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

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

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

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.

So be sure when you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life's A Great Balancing Act. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and percent guaranteed) Kid, you'll move mountains.

Great towers take time to construct.

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow minded misanthrope a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.

If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.

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.

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.

A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.

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.

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

Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

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

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

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

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.

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

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

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.

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

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

War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.

A thing may be incredible and still be true sometimes it is incredible because it is true.

I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.

Theres something ever egotistical in mountain tops and towers and all things grand and lofty.

The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.

Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.

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.

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

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

A laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer.

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

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

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

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

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

When a companions heart of itself overflows the best one can do is to do nothing.

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.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

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

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

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

Bachelors alone can travel freely and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire side.

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.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, a rather too scarce a good thing.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

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.

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

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.

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

Envy...since it’s lodgement is in the heart, not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.

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.