Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Herman Melville was an American writer of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was not well known to the public, but 1919, the centennial of his birth, was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick would eventually be considered one of the Great American Novels.

Quotes

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.
Toward the accomplishment of an aim, which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shores our bed and eats at our own table.
Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself!
For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.
He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man.
If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
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.
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Language, Understanding
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.
Where does the violet tint end and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blending enter into the other. So with sanity and insanity.
He who has never failed somewhere. . . that man can not be great.
Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

Home
Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all dreadfully cracked about the head and desperately in need of mending.

Miscellaneous