Herman Melville
If not against us, nature is not for us.Collection: Nature
I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.Collection: God
Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.Collection: Sea
This divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.Collection: Inspirational
What like a bullet can undeceive!Collection: Deception
One would like to know, what were foes made for except to be used?Collection: Use
At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand; and never slept so sound beforeCollection: Hands
Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?Collection: Numbers
Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.Collection: Men
He says NO! In thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.Collection: Devil
We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.Collection: Israel
In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.Collection: Angel
Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.Collection: God
There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.Collection: Climbing
Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.Collection: Food
Climate of Egypt in winter is the reign of spring upon earth, & summer in the air, and tranquility in the heat.Collection: Summer
For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.Collection: Clean
But the might-have-been is but boggy ground to build upon.Collection: Might
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.Collection: Sunset
Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.Collection: Ignorant
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!Collection: Art
Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?Collection: Pain
There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.Collection: Lying
In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.Collection: Army
We cannibals must help these Christians.Collection: Christian
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?Collection: Atheist
Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.Collection: Sleep
As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.Collection: Creativity
I would prefer not to.Collection: Ego
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.Collection: Stars
A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Sad
There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.Collection: Men
Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil?Collection: Mourning
Youth is immortal; Tis the elderly only grow old!Collection: Elderly
The pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bearthe earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invokedfor favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.Collection: Wrath
There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.Collection: Men
The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.Collection: Ocean
The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.Collection: Character
All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.Collection: Profound
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.Collection: Ubiquity
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.Collection: Rain
There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.Collection: Balloons
What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.Collection: Men
My body is but the lees of my better being.Collection: Body
There is no figure more common in scripture, and none more beautiful, than that by which Christ is likened unto light. Incomprehensible in its nature, itself the first visible, and that by which all things are seen, light represents to us Christ. Whose generation none can declare, but Who must shine upon us ere we can know aught aright, whether of things Divine or human.Collection: Beautiful
To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.Collection: Deeds
God is liberal of color; so should man be.Collection: Men
The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.Collection: Men