Herman Melville Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?”

“Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.”

“There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.”

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

“Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.”

“There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

“There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.”

“There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.”

“Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”

“To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.”