Quote

Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

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
Thrown
Institutions
Assimilate
Elements
Digestion
However
Potent
May
Convert
Good
Originally
Time
Alien
Aliens

More quotes by Herman Melville

Image
No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Herman Melville
Image
Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
Herman Melville
Image
I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil. (Ego baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.)
Herman Melville
Image
Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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
Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
Herman Melville
Image
The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
Herman Melville
Image
He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.
Herman Melville
Image
It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
Herman Melville
Image
Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
Herman Melville
Image
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
Image
Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
Herman Melville
Image
There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
Herman Melville
Image
Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
Herman Melville
Image
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
Herman Melville
Image
Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
Herman Melville
Image
The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
Herman Melville
Image
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
Herman Melville
Image
Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
Herman Melville
Image
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.
Herman Melville