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

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

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Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
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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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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
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Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.
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When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.
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Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
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There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
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If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
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I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
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Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
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Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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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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The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.
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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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