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He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

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
Danger
Oftenest
Goes
Cape
Capes
Horn
Horns
Prudence
Round
Rounds

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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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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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You cannot hide the soul.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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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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For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
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Failure is the test of greatness.
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
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For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
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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 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.
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All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.
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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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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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There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.
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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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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
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