As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is – “How many skulls?“ – the same way that whalers hail – “How many barrels?” And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses.

— Herman Melville

Herman Melville Quotes

Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?

— Herman Melville

When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.

— Herman Melville

Sailors are the only class of men who now-a-days see anything like stirring adventure; and many things which to fire-side people appear strange and romantic, to them seem as common-place as a jacket out at elbows.

— Herman Melville

But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels.

— Herman Melville

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.

— Herman Melville

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

— Herman Melville

Tis July’s immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today!

— Herman Melville

I’d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.

— Herman Melville

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere.

— Herman Melville

How obvious it is it, too, that this necessity for the whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase.

— Herman Melville

Como la gaviota sin tierra que, al atardecer, pliega las alas y se mece hasta dormirse entre el oleaje, al caer la noche el hombre de Nantucket, lejos de la tierra, recoge las velas y se echa a dormir, mientras bajo su almohada corren morsas y ballenas.

— Herman Melville

My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.

— Herman Melville

And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

— Herman Melville

Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself.

— Herman Melville

Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!

— Herman Melville

But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

— Herman Melville

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

— Herman Melville

To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!

— Herman Melville

But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

— Herman Melville

Eternity is not ours by right; and, alone, unrequited sufferings here, form no title thereto, unless resurrections are reserved for maltreated brutes. Suffering is suffering; be the sufferer man, brute, or thing.

— Herman Melville
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