Herman Melville Quotes

The eyes are the gateway to the soul.

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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.

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The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns

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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other So with sanity and insanity.

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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.

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It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment.

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. . . 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.

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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .

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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 . . .

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Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them . . .

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Let me look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better than to gaze upon God.

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Out of natural courtesy he received, but did not appropriate. It was like a gift placed in the palm of an outreached hand upon which the fingers do not close.

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From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.

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There is nothing namable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

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Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

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With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it apprehending the good, but powerless to be it a nature like Claggart's surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it.

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The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.

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I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.

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They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. The dignity is in leisure.

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To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

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Ignorance is the parent of fear . . .

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Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

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To the last, I grapple with thee From Hell's heart, I stab at thee For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

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In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

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