Quotes & Sayings About Melville

Shall I call that Wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. — Herman Melville

Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols. — Herman Melville

The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead. — Herman Melville

Herman Melville was supposed to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the train into New York and work for a bank. To be an artist, you have to say goodbye to your family. — Don McLean

I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
(moby dick chap 26 p112) — Herman Melville

Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet! - that one strives, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. — Herman Melville

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. — Herman Melville

And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. — Herman Melville

Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another. — Herman Melville

Climate of Egypt in winter is the reign of spring upon earth, & summer in the air, and tranquility in the heat. — Herman Melville

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer. — Melville Fuller

Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by. — Herman Melville

It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. — Herman Melville

I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible! — Gary Paulsen

The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation. — Melville Fuller

As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage. — Herman Melville

For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merrymakings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. — Herman Melville

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. — Herman Melville

I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. — Herman Melville

The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included. — Herman Melville

Start her, now; give 'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy
start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool
cucumbers is the word
easy, easy
only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys
that's all. Start her! — Herman Melville

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. — Herman Melville

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. — John Updike

If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid. — Herman Melville

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. (moby dick chap 29 p123) — Herman Melville

And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. — Herman Melville

Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. — Herman Melville

Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear! — Herman Melville

When you sleep in your cloak there 's no lodging to pay. — George Whyte-Melville

Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores;let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God's right to come. — Herman Melville

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall. — Herman Melville

Crazies always recognize each other. I think Melville said it, in a slightly different context: "Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Of course, we're not talking about genius here, we're talking about crazies - but — Alex Haley

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another. — Herman Melville

We cannibals must help these Christians. — Herman Melville

If not against us, nature is not for us. — Herman Melville

It's the honest point of view of an artist: You have to please.I'd like viewers to come away from my films unsure whether they've understood them. I want to leave them wondering. — Jean-Pierre Melville

Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien. — Herman Melville

I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God? — Herman Melville

Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfillment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana. That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly. — D.H. Lawrence

Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe. — Herman Melville

1
These have been corrected in this EPUB3 edition. — Herman Melville

Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. — Herman Melville

The pleasure of leaving home, care-free, with no concern but to enjoy, has also as a pendant the pleasure of coming back to the old hearthstone, the home to which, however traveled, the heart still fondly turns, ignoring the burden of its anxieties and cares. — Herman Melville

But I shall follow the endless, winding way, - the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land. — Herman Melville

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

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. — Herman Melville

of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the — Herman Melville

Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. — Herman Melville

... for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown — Herman Melville

Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. — Herman Melville

Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while they enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grind-stone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty. — Herman Melville

Consider all this; and then turn to this 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? — Herman Melville

With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her
a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun
by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor
which, wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriquante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta. — Herman Melville

All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age. — Herman Melville

Sometimes a cloudless swatch of sky would blow past the moon, and Pella could see the outline of Mike's face in a slightly sharper relief. It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he'd hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize at the zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her. She would stand at the kitchen window and look out at the quad, at the Melville statue and beyond that the beach and the rolling lake, and realize that Make, for however long, had been standing beside her, staring at the same thing. — Chad Harbach

The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor's good opinion. — Herman Melville

Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard. — Herman Melville

We become sad in the first place because we have nothing stirring to do. — Herman Melville

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head's [Right Whale] expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. — Herman Melville

Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity. — Herman Melville

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 loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? — Herman Melville

Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! — Herman Melville

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up - flaked up, with rose-water snow. — Herman Melville

To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote. — Herman Melville

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to. — Herman Melville

For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself? — Herman Melville

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. — Herman Melville

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. — Herman Melville

What a beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lines, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. — Herman Melville

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ... — Dan Simmons

A ship doesn't look quite the same from inside, does it? A wise sailor,' Robert said, fanning his arms, 'will one time stand upon the shore and watch his ship sail by, that he shall from then on appreciate not being left behind.' He grinned and added, 'Eh?'

George gave him a little grimace. 'Who's that? Melville? Or C.S. Forrester?'

It's me!' Robert complained. "Can't I be profound now and again?'

Hell, no.'

Why not?'

Because you're still alive. Gotta be dead to be profound.'

You're unchivalrous, George. — Diane Carey

As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, "All mortal greatness is but disease. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. — Herman Melville

Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself. — Herman Melville

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. — Herman Melville

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,
though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,
in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life ... — Herman Melville

Can't withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. — Herman Melville

In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay
the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged
/But the Year and the Man were gone. ("The Armies of the Wilderness") — Herman Melville

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. — Herman Melville

The characters tell their story - I am merely the tool used to record it — Marti Melville

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

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended. — Herman Melville

Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! — Herman Melville

Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself. — Herman Melville

Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. — Herman Melville

We cannot live for ourselves alone. — Herman Melville

The grand principles of virtue and honor, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same the world over: and wherethese principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind. — Herman Melville

In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad ... How can'st thou endure without being mad? — Herman Melville

There is an aesthetics in all things. — Herman Melville

It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli. — Melville Davisson Post

For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. — Herman Melville

These Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it. — Herman Melville

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. — Herman Melville

And while the other creatures on all fours Look downwards, man was made to hold his head Erect in majesty and see the sky, And raise his eyes to the bright stars above. — A.D. Melville

It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement. — Herman Melville

I somehow cling to the strange fancy, that, in all men hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult properties - as in some plants and minerals - which by some happy but very rare accident (as bronze was discovered by the melting of the iron and brass at the burning of Corinth) may change to be called forth here on earth. — Herman Melville

Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism. — Herman Melville

Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars! — Herman Melville

Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? — Herman Melville

It is not down on any map; true places never are. — Herman Melville