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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

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
Joy
Ancestry
Posterity
Grief

More quotes by Herman Melville

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If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.
Herman Melville
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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
Herman Melville
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
Herman Melville
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Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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.
Herman Melville
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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
Herman Melville
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The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
Herman Melville
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The world is forever babbling of originality but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original the only original author being God.
Herman Melville
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In childhood, death stirred me not in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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He, who, in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it.
Herman Melville
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The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
Herman Melville
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Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.
Herman Melville
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The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville