Quotes from Herman Melville

For here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming...

Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.

I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man

Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste-- his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. 76

Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.

The higher the intelligence, the more faith, and the less credulity; Gabriel rejects more than we, but out-believes us all.

upon the tarnished head-boards, nearby, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, the ship's name, SAN DOMINICK, each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of the hull.

To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!

It is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!

Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours to civilize civilization and Christianize Christendom?

Even death may prove unreal at last and stoics be astounded into heaven. Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned, Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind. That like the crocus budding through the snow, that like a swimmer rising from the deep, that like a burning secret which doth go. Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep, emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea and prove that death but routs life into victory.