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How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

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
Heart
Cells
Masons
Punishment
Inflict
Solitude
Horrors
Prison
Prisons
Horror
Feeble
Population
Condemn
Upon
Perpetual
Wretches
Language
Describe
Mason

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Some dying men are the most tyrannical and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright goodfeeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless--well, finish the sentence for yourself.
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It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.
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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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What like a bullet can undeceive!
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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
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Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.
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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?
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The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
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Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
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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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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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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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I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.
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Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
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Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
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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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There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
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