Herman Melville quotes

  1. Home
  2. Herman Melville quotes
Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.
Herman Melville
Friendship
Love
Truth
First
Sight
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Herman Melville
Christian
Sleep
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.
Herman Melville
Travel
Virtue
Sin
World
Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
Herman Melville
Soul
Hope
Eternity
Struggle
Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
Herman Melville
Heaven
Mercy
Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
Herman Melville
Habit
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Herman Melville
Man
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
Imitation
Originality
Succeed
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
Herman Melville
Heart
Hate
Race
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
Herman Melville
Open
Talk
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
Herman Melville
Faith
Hope
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
Man
Words
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
Herman Melville
Smile
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Herman Melville
College
Art is the objectification of feeling.
Herman Melville
Art
Feeling