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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.

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
Nautical
Yacht
Sailing
Spent
Great
Never
Men
Life
Inland

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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world deaf to its voice and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.
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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
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Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
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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.
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The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.
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When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
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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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The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.
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Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.
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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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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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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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Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
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Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.
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He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.
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In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.
Herman Melville