Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melvillewas an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period best known for Typee, a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick. His work was almost forgotten during his last thirty years. His writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. He developed a complex, baroque style:...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 August 1819
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.
There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
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.
To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?