From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it.

— Herman Melville

Genius is full of trash.

— Herman Melville

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

— Herman Melville

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

— Herman Melville

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that 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.

— Herman Melville

He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

— Herman Melville

Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so gray did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbucks? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.

— Herman Melville

He who has never failed somewhere that man cannot be great.

— Herman Melville

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

— Herman Melville

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg.

— Herman Melville