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And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

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Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Profession: Novelist
Nationality: American

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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.

Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.

I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

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.

I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.

That one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

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.

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

Yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the.

For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

These Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it.

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