Quote

Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.

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
Though
Twenty
Better
Twenties
Secure
King
Oneself
Kings
Violence
Monarchs
Millions
Exposed

More quotes by 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
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.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
Let us only hate hatred and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.
Herman Melville
Image
Leviathan is not the biggest fish — I have heard of Krakens.
Herman Melville
Image
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
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
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.
Herman Melville
Image
All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.
Herman Melville
Image
Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I look deep down and do believe.
Herman Melville
Image
We die, because we live.
Herman Melville
Image
contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.
Herman Melville
Image
The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Herman Melville
Image
...a man of true science uses few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose Where as the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
Herman Melville
Image
I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
Herman Melville
Image
Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
Herman Melville
Image
Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.
Herman Melville
Image
Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville