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Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.

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
Appall
Castaway
Woe
Seeks
Please
Rather

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Twelve o'clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine setting an eminent example to all mankind.
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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.
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Let me look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better than to gaze upon God.
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Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
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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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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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None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
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In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
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An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in.
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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.
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We die, because we live.
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Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
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At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand and never slept so sound before
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The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
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This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant I act under orders.
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We are only what we are not what we would be nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
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I would prefer not to.
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Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
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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 . . .
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