Herman Melville
I try all things, I achieve what I can.Collection: Trying
Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.Collection: Judgement
That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.Collection: Butterfly
But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves. Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.Collection: Memories
Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.Collection: Running
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Beautiful
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.Collection: Strong
The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.Collection: Evil
All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque.Collection: Art
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.Collection: Fear
If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.Collection: Born
Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.Collection: Lakes
We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.Collection: Swings
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.Collection: Mean
Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.Collection: Texas
When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!Collection: Life
Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?Collection: Lying
Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.Collection: Compassion
Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.Collection: Memories
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.Collection: Heart
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.Collection: Sympathy
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.Collection: Beautiful
I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.Collection: Personality
flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.Collection: Home
The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.Collection: Giving
It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.Collection: Whales
A man can be honest in any sort of skin.Collection: Men
Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.Collection: Littles
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.Collection: Drama
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.Collection: Beauty
The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.Collection: Fiction
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.Collection: Life
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!Collection: Believe
How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.Collection: Heart
Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.Collection: Spring
Niggards are oftentimes neat.Collection: Niggard
Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.Collection: Flames
Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.Collection: Men
I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itselfCollection: Calm
That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.Collection: Men
War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim.Collection: Determination
I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.Collection: Flags
To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.Collection: Spring
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.Collection: Light
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.Collection: Branches
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.Collection: Sweet
In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary?Collection: World
There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.Collection: Men