Herman Melville - Moby Dick

Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.
Herman Melville
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shores our bed and eats at our own table.
Herman Melville
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
He who has never failed somewhere. . . that man can not be great.
Herman Melville
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 - Billy Budd, Sailor
Toward the accomplishment of an aim, which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort.
Herman Melville
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
Where does the violet tint end and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blending enter into the other. So with sanity and insanity.

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

- Herman Melville - Moby Dick