Herman Melville May Quotations

The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.

We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

Nothing may help or heal While Amor incensed remembers wrong.

And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.

If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.

A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.

To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.

We talk of the Turks, and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them, go to heaven, before some of us?

Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!