Quote

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

Herman Melville

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Whole
Affair
Men
Jokes
Queer
Life
Strange
Mixed
Takes
Practicals
Call
Practical
Times
Joke
Universe
Occasions
Certain
Vast

More quotes by Herman Melville

Image
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
Herman Melville
Image
In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
Herman Melville
Image
It is not down in any map true places never are.
Herman Melville
Image
Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?
Herman Melville
Image
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Herman Melville
Image
Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Herman Melville
Image
Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
Herman Melville
Image
An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Herman Melville
Image
And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
Herman Melville
Image
It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
Herman Melville
Image
The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
Herman Melville
Image
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.
Herman Melville
Image
all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
Herman Melville
Image
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
Herman Melville
Image
But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.
Herman Melville
Image
A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
Herman Melville
Image
Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
Herman Melville
Image
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
Herman Melville
Image
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
Herman Melville
Image
I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
Herman Melville