Herman Melville

The poor old Past, The Future's slave, She drudged through pain and crime To bring about the blissful Prime, Then — perished. There's a grave!

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

Well, there is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.

"I would prefer not to." (A line spoken repeatedly by Bartleby)

And here Bartleby makes his home, sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous — a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!

Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," was his mildly cadaverous reply.

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own …

His was the scorn which thinks it not worth the while to be scornful. Those he most scorned, never knew it.

There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. . . . Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.

Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved …

All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event — the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a …

But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.

Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

I found that but to glean after this man, is better than to be in at the harvest of others.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.