We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.
I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.
There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.
A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.
Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.