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A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.

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
Criticism
Brain
Better
Calf
Book
Calves
Writing
Safer
Men
Bound
Bounds
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All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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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.
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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.
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That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
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We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before the world is not yet middle-aged.
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There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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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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It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
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Leviathan is not the biggest fish — I have heard of Krakens.
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Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.
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Silence is the only Voice of our God.
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He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.
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