Quote

Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.

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
Beauty
Often
Inspirational
Beautiful
Impairs
Everything
Bestows
Real
Harmony
Much
Magic
Never
Strength

More quotes by Herman Melville

Image
Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
Herman Melville
Image
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Herman Melville
Image
We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
Herman Melville
Image
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Herman Melville
Image
Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
Herman Melville
Image
I am past scorching not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
Herman Melville
Image
The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
Herman Melville
Image
There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.
Herman Melville
Image
An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Herman Melville
Image
The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.
Herman Melville
Image
As with ships, so with men he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
Herman Melville
Image
Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
Herman Melville
Image
Men there are, who having quite done with the world, all its merely worldly contents are become so far indifferent, that they carelittle of what mere worldly imprudence they may be guilty.
Herman Melville
Image
It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.
Herman Melville
Image
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
Herman Melville
Image
But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
Herman Melville
Image
Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.
Herman Melville
Image
The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
Herman Melville
Image
Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
Herman Melville
Image
It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
Herman Melville