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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

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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

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No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
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No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days of summer, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.
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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
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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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All truth is profound.
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O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
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Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
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As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.
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See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
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Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.
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In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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...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.
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Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
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As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
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For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
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...a man of true science uses few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose Where as the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
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What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
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