Quote

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

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
Mountain
Rush
Gorges
Path
Laid
Swerve
Purpose
Mountains
Rails
Running
Iron
Naught
Soul
Obstacles
Beds
Heart
Fixed
Rail
Unerringly
Way
Bed
Obstacle
Torrents
Hearts
Angle
Whereon

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It is plain and demonstrable, that much ale is not good for Yankee, and operates differently upon them from what it does upon a Briton ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.
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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
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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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You know nothing till you know all which is the reason we never know any thing.
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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.
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Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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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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Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.
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contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.
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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.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
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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.
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How it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
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Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
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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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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
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