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A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.

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
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Military
Martial
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Allegiance
Keep
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Officer

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Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
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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.
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The man's (a heathen south sea islander) a human being, just as I am he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably -why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work -for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?
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It is not down in any map true places never are.
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But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
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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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It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
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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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Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
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Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
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He, who, in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it.
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all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
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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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I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
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If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.
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