We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
HERMAN MELVILLEThe worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
More Herman Melville Quotes
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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
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 -
I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
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 -
Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Nature is nobody’s ally.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Failure is the true test of greatness
HERMAN MELVILLE -
You cannot hide the soul.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Art is the objectification of feeling.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
HERMAN MELVILLE