Herman Melville Quotes

Herman Melville is perhaps best-known for Moby-Dick, but Typee was the most popular book during his lifetime. Herman Melville was a novelist, essayist, and poet. Here are a few of the famous quotes from this major American writer...

• "In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war's men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty."
  - Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor
  
  
• "The traveler who at the present day is content to travel in the good old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by a stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to be frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the roughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveler in the eastern part of Berkshire, Mass., will find ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to the ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public conveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist the interior of Bohemia."
  - Herman Melville, Israel Potter
  
  
• "We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound."
  - Herman Melville, Mardi: and a Voyage of Thither
  
  
• "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation."
  - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
  
  
• "It was the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our escape from the bay."
  - Herman Melville, Omoo
  
  
• "There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world."
  - Herman Melville, Pierre
  
  
• "Wellingborough, as you are going to sea, suppose you take this shooting-jacket of mine along; it's just the thing--take it, it will save the expense of another."
  - Herman Melville, Redburn
  
  
• "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."
  - Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man