“[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
Source: Moby Dick (Illustrated & Annotated Edition)
“What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.”
Source: Moby-Dick
“Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.”
Source: Selected Poems of Herman Melville
“Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.”
Source: White-jacket: or, The world in a man-of-war
“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.”
Source: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Works of Melville
“Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.”
Source: White Jacket, the World on a Man-of-War: Works of Melville
“Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.”
Source: Pierre; or The Ambiguities
“There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.”
“The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?).”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.”
“Only the man who says no is free”
“There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.”
Source: White Jacket
“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.”
Source: Moby-Dick: or, The Whale
“Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup.”
Source: Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories
“Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man.”
Source: Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville
“So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.”
Source: White-jacket; Or, The World in the Man-of-war
“Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.”
Source: White-jacket: or, The world in a man-of-war
“The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius,--simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“A beautiful woman is born Queen of men and women both, as Mary Stuart was born Queen of Scots, whether men or women.”
Source: Pierre; or The Ambiguities
“One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.”
Source: Bartleby, The Scrivener
“In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.”
Source: THE TALES OF THE SEA - Premium Collection: 10 Maritime Novels & Adventure Classics in One Volume: Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Israel Potter, Billy Budd, Sailor, Benito Cereno & The Encantadas (Based on the Author's Experiences on a Cargo Ship & US Navy Service)
“It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.”
Source: The Ambiguities
“Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the "very best society" that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of "dressing" to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.”
Source: Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities
“Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after.”
Source: The Ambiguities
“The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original; the only original author being God.”
Source: Pierre, Or The Ambiguities: Volume Seven, Scholarly Edition
“I don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf--at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel--you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.”
“He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers,--it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.”
Source: Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
“Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.”
Source: Moby Dick (Illustrated & Annotated Edition)
“When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?”
Source: Billy Budd, and other prose pieces, edited by R. W. Weaver
“The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.”
Source: Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
“In the operative opinion of the world, he who is already fully provided with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more;while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world.”
Source: Pierre; or The Ambiguities
“The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.”
Source: Billy Budd
“There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.”
Source: The Confidence-man: His Masquerade
“As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.”
Source: White-jacket; Or, The World in the Man-of-war
“Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?”
Source: Redburn.His First Voyage
“Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.”
Source: Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
“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.”
Source: The Ambiguities
“That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.”
Source: Moby-Dick
“Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.”
Source: Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
“The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.”
Source: Moby-Dick: or, The Whale
“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.”
Source: White-jacket; Or, The World in the Man-of-war
“As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.”
Source: White-jacket: or, The world in a man-of-war
“All experience teaches that, whenever there is a great national establishment, employing large numbers of officials, the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many of the worthy.”
Source: White-jacket: or, The world in a man-of-war
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
