“The incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness …”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“It is a very common error of some unscrupulously infidel-minded, selfish, unprincipled, or downright knavish men, to suppose that believing men, or benevolent-hearted men, or good men, do not know enough to be unscrupulously selfish, do not know enough to be unscrupulous knaves.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues made them great and noble. They possessed a natural majesty that was not put on and taken off at pleasure, as was that of certain eastern monarchs when they put on or took off their garments of Tyrian dye. It is hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“The grand principles of virtue and honor, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same the world over: and where these principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Alas! when Virtue sits high aloft on a frigate’s poop, when Virtue is crowned in the cabin of a Commodore, when Virtue rules by compulsion, and domineers over Vice as a slave, then Virtue, though her mandates be outwardly observed, bears little interior sway.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue–one given and received in entire disinterestedness–since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, not the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Wealth
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“I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Wealth
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“In the operative opinion of the world, he who is already fully provided with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Wealth
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“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Tolerance
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“When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also. Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?–Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us–Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians–sprung from one head and made in one image.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Tolerance
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“It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Where is there such an one who has not a thousand times been struck with a sort of infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be Lord of, he is not the Lord of this; for else this world would seem to give the lie to Him; so utterly repugnant seem its ways to the instinctively known ways of Heaven.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“The world’s a ship on its voyage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“After many centuries, those crescents yet unwaning shine, and count a devotee for every worshiper of yonder crosses. Truth and Merit have other symbols than success.”
Herman Melville
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
