Quotes from Herman Melville
Art is the objectification of feeling.
- Herman Melville
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
- Herman Melville
To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.
- Herman Melville
Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
- Herman Melville
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
- Herman Melville
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
- Herman Melville
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
- Herman Melville
A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.
- Herman Melville
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness
- Herman Melville
All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
- Herman Melville
And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
- Herman Melville
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