Quote

Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.

Herman Melville

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Make
Deception
People
Seem
Wealth
Rich
Poor
Business
Seems
Trying

More quotes by Herman Melville

Image
At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
Herman Melville
Image
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
Herman Melville
Image
Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
Herman Melville
Image
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
Herman Melville
Image
Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Herman Melville
Image
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
Herman Melville
Image
The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
Herman Melville
Image
There's magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.
Herman Melville
Image
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
Herman Melville
Image
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.
Herman Melville
Image
The lightning flashes through my skull mine eyeballs ache and ache my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
Herman Melville
Image
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
Herman Melville
Image
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days of summer, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.
Herman Melville
Image
For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
Herman Melville
Image
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
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.
Herman Melville
Image
All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
Herman Melville