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Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.

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
Matter
Though
Volume
First
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Author
World
Moments
Concern
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Poet
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Poetry
Firsts
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Human
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Verses
Humans
Literature
Insignificant

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All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
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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.
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Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
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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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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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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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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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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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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.
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Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
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It is not down in any map true places never are.
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Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
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Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I look deep down and do believe.
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It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
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We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.
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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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You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
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An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
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