Quotes by Herman Melville

Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

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.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

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.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

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

“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.”

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

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