What Quote » Novelist Quotes » Quotes by Herman Melville »

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.  
Art is the objectification of feeling.  
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.  
But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.  
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it i...  
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead ...  
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul...  
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!  
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; ...  
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage a...  
He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and ...  
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.  
How wondrous familiar is a fool!  
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then...  
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and...  
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the ...  
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.  
It is not down in any map; true places never are.  
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she ...  
Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it i...  
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slo...  
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the les...  
So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal rea...  
Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will...  
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-...  
The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpl...  
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affa...  
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the tr...  
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by con...  
There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewh...  
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.  
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the m...  
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and...  
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief t...  
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with o...  
Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.