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That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.

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
Men
Undeveloped
Mortal
Hath
Mortals
Sorrow
Joy
True
Cannot
Ecclesiastes

More quotes by Herman Melville

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Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.
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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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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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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.
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A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.
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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.
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What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.
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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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all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
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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.
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Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.
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Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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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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The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
Herman Melville
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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
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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
Herman Melville
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
Herman Melville
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But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville