Herman Melville Archives - Subconscious Quotes

Herman Melville

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

- Herman Melville

Silence is the only Voice of our God.

- Herman Melville

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

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

- Herman Melville

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

- Herman Melville

Yet habit--strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?

- Herman Melville

Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.

- Herman Melville

Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.

- Herman Melville

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.

- Herman Melville

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

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.

- Herman Melville

Truth is in things, and not in words.

- Herman Melville

. . . these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

- Herman Melville

If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

- Herman Melville

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

- 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

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

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

- Herman Melville

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

- Herman Melville

He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.

- Herman Melville

Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.

- Herman Melville

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

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

- Herman Melville

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

- Herman Melville

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

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