Herman Melville

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”

“He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.”

“Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for t...”

“So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever...”

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the u...”

“But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do - remember that - and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselv...”

“Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

“But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.”

“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

“Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.”

“More terrible, to see how feline Fate will sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp this cat-...”

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

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”

“[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

“Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were br...”

“The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.”

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

“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 she...”