Quote

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

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
Sure
Young
Mortal
Mortals
Greatness
Ambition
Disease

More quotes by Herman Melville

Image
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
Herman Melville
Image
When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.
Herman Melville
Image
all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
Herman Melville
Image
Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?
Herman Melville
Image
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
Herman Melville
Image
You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in.
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
There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.
Herman Melville
Image
Standing navies, as well as standing armies, serve to keep alive the spirit of war even in the meek heart of peace. In its very embers and smoulderings, they nourish that fatal fire, and half-pay officers, as the priests of Mars, yet guard the temple, though no god be there.
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
Let me look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better than to gaze upon God.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand and never slept so sound before
Herman Melville
Image
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
Herman Melville
Image
As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
Herman Melville
Image
We die, because we live.
Herman Melville
Image
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
Image
In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.
Herman Melville