“At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright goodfeeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless--well, finish the sentence for yourself.”
Quote by Herman Melville
“We die of too much life.”
Source: Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
“We die, because we live.”
Source: Romances of Herman Melville: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Mopby-Dick, White-jacket, Israel Potter, Redburn
“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)
“He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)
“All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque.”
Source: Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
Source: Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860: Volume Nine, Scholarly Edition
“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
“all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.”
Source: The Works of Herman Melville: Billy Budd, and other prose picecs
