Herman Melville Quotes

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

Of erections how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!

I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

But this whole world is a preposterous one, with many preposterous people in it.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.

Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.

At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand; and never slept so sound before

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

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake tho' for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.

Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.