A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
- Herman Melville Quote

Art is the objectification of feeling.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
- Herman Melville Quote

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
- Herman Melville Quote

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
- Herman Melville Quote

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
- Herman Melville Quote

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
- Herman Melville Quote

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

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

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

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

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

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

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.
- Herman Melville Quote

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
- Herman Melville Quote

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

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