I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
HERMAN MELVILLETruth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
More Herman Melville Quotes
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You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.
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 -
Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
HERMAN MELVILLE -
It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Failure is the test of greatness.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Art is the objectification of feeling.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…. We are not a nation, so much as a world.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, no matter how comical.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter’s ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
You cannot hide the soul.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
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.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
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 MELVILLE