Herman Melville
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.Collection: Happiness
We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.Collection: Soul
We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.Collection: Death
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.Collection: Pain
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.Collection: Religious
for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of menCollection: Men
Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.Collection: Mother
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.Collection: Laughter
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poorCollection: Poor
A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.Collection: Book
It is against the will of God that the East should be Christianized.Collection: East
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.Collection: Wise
Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.Collection: Merit
An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.Collection: Happiness
When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.Collection: Heart
Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.Collection: Essence
He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.Collection: Capes
The terrors of truth and dart of death To faith alike are vain.Collection: Faith
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.Collection: Sea
Until we understand that our grief outweighs a thousand joys, we will never understand what Christianity is all about.Collection: Grief
Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!Collection: Sorry
In some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.Collection: Country
The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.Collection: Profound
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.Collection: Inspirational
However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.Collection: Baby
Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.Collection: Travel
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.Collection: Morning
He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.Collection: Married
truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.Collection: Long
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.Collection: Men
He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.Collection: Courage
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.Collection: Noble
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.Collection: Dream
All truth is profound.Collection: Truth
Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.Collection: Poetry
Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!Collection: Humanity
Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.Collection: Praise
Honor lies in the mane of a horse.Collection: Horse
As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.Collection: Men
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a sharp, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.Collection: Ocean
You cannot hide the soul.Collection: Soul
Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation. Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway.Collection: Names
But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.Collection: Heart
Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle-a great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy.Collection: Wise
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!Collection: Running
One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocence self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.Collection: Depression
From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space.Collection: Stars
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.Collection: Passive Resistance
That hour in the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest. There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan.Collection: Dog