Tao Te Ching
Herman Melville
1819 – 1891 CE
One of the best and most influential of all American writers but almost forgotten and unknown during the last 30 years of his life when he had to take a job as a Customs Inspector; Melville brought myth, scripture, philosophy, and mystical imagery to his haunting novels. Drawing on his adventurous ocean travels, he wrote Moby Dick which was a commercial failure and strongly criticized when first written but became a world classic described by D. H. Lawrence as "the greatest book of the sea ever written" and "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.” Portraying the delicate dance between truth and illusion, the impossibility of deep and mutual communication, and the search for the absolute in the relative; his works gave a deep and powerful color to world literature.
Lineages
American (USA) Artists Humanism Poets
Eras
Western
Romantacism (1800 – 1850 CE)Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)
Gilded Age (1860 – 1900 CE)
Victorian (1837 – 1901 CE)
American Civil War (1861 – 1865 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
Quotes by Herman Melville (50 quotes)
“better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation”
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“From Hell's heart, I stab… for hate's sake, I spit my last breath”
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“All that most maddens and torments… all the subtle demons of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified... in Moby Dick.”
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“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”
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“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
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“Ignorance is the parent of fear and being so nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself”
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“there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men”
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“in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy… Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
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“See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.”
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“a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. … the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air… to lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
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“Nothing exists in itself… there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”
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“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”
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“let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”
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“Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
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“God keep me from ever completing anything… For small creations may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity.”
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“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them”
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“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.”
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“when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.”
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“all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore”
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“How then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”
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“I am past scorching; not easily can you scorch a scar.”
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“Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”
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“vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound”
Chapters:
73. Heaven’s Net
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“Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness”
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“All of us are slaves… landsmen pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks”
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“A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce of a good thing… the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure that there is more in that man than you perhaps think”
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“We have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death… my body is but the lees of my better being, it is not me”
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“though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty”
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“an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward… the most reliable and useful courage is that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril.”
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“The most wonderful things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs”
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“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the arc of Liberties of the world... almost for the first time in the history of the earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we can not do a good to America but we give alms to the world.”
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“Now would all the waves be women, then I'd go drown and chase with them evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.”
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“But when a man's religion becomes really fanatic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of our an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.”
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“that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
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“sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”
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“that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The center and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”
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“a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left—that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated... I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
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“what trances of torments does the man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.”
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“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks... If a man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is the wall.”
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“what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!”
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“And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head.”
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“free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus proscribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”
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“all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe... as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like”
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“I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
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“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
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Quotes about Herman Melville (3 quotes)
“The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.”
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“You can imagine Herman Melville coming to his publisher with his new manuscript. They ask him what it's about, and he says, 'It's about a one-legged captain who's had his leg bitten off by a whale.' It wouldn't have sounded that promising. If a man cares intensely enough about tiddlywinks, his book about tiddlywinks will be a great novel.”
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“Nobody had more class than Melville... [he] took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.”
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