Herman Melville

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Christian #Drinking

“Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor”
-- Herman Melville

#Poor #Feds #Criticize

“If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.”
-- Herman Melville

#World #Dinner

“An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.”
-- Herman Melville

#Fear #Men #Coward

“Genius is full of trash.”
-- Herman Melville

#Genius #Trash

“Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing.”
-- Herman Melville

#Fate #Laughing

“The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head”
-- Herman Melville

#Games #Long #Sailing

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
-- Herman Melville

#Life #Sympathy #Beautiful

“Meditation and water are wedded for ever.”
-- Herman Melville

#Water #Meditation

“Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
-- Herman Melville

#Brother #Ocean #Sea

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Life #Spiritual

“I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.”
-- Herman Melville

#Believe #Men #Thinking

“I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.”
-- Herman Melville

#Christian #Kindness #Trying

“It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.”
-- Herman Melville

#Greatness #Men #Tests

“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
-- Herman Melville

#Inspirational #Knowledge #Learning

“A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.”
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Writing #Men

“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

#Heart #Law #Long

“A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
-- Herman Melville

#College #Yale #Whales

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
-- Herman Melville

#Book #Writing #Produce

“There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”
-- Herman Melville

#Reality #Quality #World

“I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
-- Herman Melville

#Travel #Adventure #Land

“A chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving the host of the God of War--Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.”
-- Herman Melville

#War #Would Be #Purpose

“Did all the lets and bars appear To every just or larger end, Whence should come the trust and cheer? Youth must its ignorant impulse lend-- Age finds place in the rear. All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state”
-- Herman Melville

#Cheer #War #Boys

“They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.”
-- Herman Melville

#Work #Politics #Leisure

“A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”
-- Herman Melville

#Noble #Crafts #Melancholy

“Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”
-- Herman Melville

#Running #Hands #Circles

“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.”
-- Herman Melville

#Art #Lying #White

“Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.”
-- Herman Melville

#Strength #Way #Faults

“Truth is in things, and not in words.”
-- Herman Melville

#Truth Is