Words matter. These are the best Herman Melville Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
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.
They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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.
Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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.
Art is the objectification of feeling.
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.
To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
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.
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.
There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
