Quote

beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.

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
Like
Chairs
Needed
Days
Beauty
Read
Constancy
Easy
Piety
Running
Tranquility
Cannot
Chair

More quotes by Herman Melville

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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
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Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
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Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
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The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.
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Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.
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Let us pray that the great historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.
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I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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You know nothing till you know all which is the reason we never know any thing.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
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I will frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of- war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.
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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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It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.
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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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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
Herman Melville
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Where is there such an one who has not a thousand times been struck with a sort of infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be Lord of, he is not the Lord of this for else this world would seem to give the lie to Him so utterly repugnant seem its ways to the instinctively known ways of Heaven.
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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.
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This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant I act under orders.
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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
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