Herman Melville

Herman Melville

"Ignorance is the parent of fear."
44 Quotes
"Ignorance is the parent of fear."
Herman Melville Moby-Dick or, The Whale
"There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future."
Herman Melville
"A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities."
Herman Melville
"Art is the objectification of feeling."
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
"He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great."
Herman Melville
"Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister."
Herman Melville
"Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth."
Herman Melville
"Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land."
Herman Melville
"Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?"
Herman Melville
"To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."
Herman Melville
"Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity."
Herman Melville
"From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it."
Herman Melville
"He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea."
Herman Melville
"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."
Herman Melville
"He who has never failed somewhere that man cannot be great."
Herman Melville
"Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosopher to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so helplessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what us, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home."
Herman Melville
"...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them."
Herman Melville
"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."
Herman Melville
"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."
Herman Melville
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