Herman Melville

The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up!

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

It is an irreparable loss to literature.

Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosom the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breast is soon converted into the bitterest hate.

Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible!

It is strange the power that a mind of deep passion has over feebler natures.

It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.

Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?

“Awake!” roared Toby in a rage, “awake! You mean to insinuate I’ve been asleep, do you? It is an insult to a man to suppose he could sleep in such an infernal place as this.”

Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair.

Haven’t I Trumpet? He’s the cheerer. He crows through all; crows at the darkest: Glory to God in the highest! Continually he crows it.

I am aware of no feeling, either of pleasure or of pain, that so completely deprives one of all power to resist its impulses, as this same raging thirst.

Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.

Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not understand, human nature.

Flora was their jeweller.

Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do?

Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laureled victor, but in this vanquished one.

The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.

So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.