Herman Melville
Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.Collection: Soul
And the visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.Collection: World
Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores;let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God's right to come.Collection: Topics
Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man.Collection: Heart
At banquets surfeit not, but fill; partake, and retire; and eat not again till you crave.Collection: Eating
Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand.Collection: Hands
I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.Collection: Views
In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.Collection: God
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.Collection: Land
The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.Collection: Shadow
There is a woe that is wisdom, a woe that is madness.Collection: Wisdom
Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions.Collection: Funeral
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.Collection: Men
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.Collection: War
In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.Collection: Men
beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.Collection: Beauty
For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices.... The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.Collection: Travel
What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?Collection: Suicide
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thingCollection: Madness
Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.Collection: Men
Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.Collection: Inspirational
When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the "big canoe" of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.Collection: Beach
Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.Collection: Grief
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure..... Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle , and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?Collection: Sea
Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.Collection: Philosophy
All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all, brothers in essence-oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but one whole.Collection: Daughter
Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the "very best society" that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of "dressing" to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.Collection: Reading
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?Collection: Ignorant
Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'Collection: Men
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.Collection: Woe
We die of too much life.Collection: Life
Great towers take time to construct.Collection: Patience
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.Collection: Stars
For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!Collection: Book
Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.Collection: War
The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.Collection: Civilization
The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.Collection: Men
I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.Collection: Past
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.Collection: Brother
Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them.Collection: Wise
The Navy is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate. Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin.Collection: Children
Everyone knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything cooly is to do it genteelly.Collection: People
Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.Collection: Women
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Lying
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Patriotic
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.Collection: Brother