There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
HERMAN MELVILLEOld age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
More Herman Melville Quotes
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Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
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Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Failure is the true test of greatness
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future 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.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
My body is but the lees of my better being.
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Whatever my fate, I’ll go to it laughing.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Silence is the only Voice of our God.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Failure is the test of greatness.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
You cannot hide the soul.
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 -
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 -
Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
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The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
HERMAN MELVILLE -
What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness?
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
HERMAN MELVILLE