Herman Melville Quotes

I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.

We cannot see but a small depth into the heart of man, and can only discover the work of his tongue.

There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden. The real world has more to do with what is hidden.

Spurn not a seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth.

Reality of things is hidden in the realm of the unseen

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be. Venice has a lot of that too, but the face of it is quite beautiful, interesting, and textured.

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.

Everything we see… is just the visible part of reality.

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives.

Underneath the reality in which we live and have our being, another altogether different reality lies concealed.

I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.

Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

It wasn't so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Most of what you encounter when you meet a man is a facade, an elaborate fig leaf, a brilliant disguise.

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.

When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.

No woman so naked as one you can see to be naked underneath her clothes.

We live merely on the crust or rind of things.

Nothing is so oppressive as a secret: women find it difficult to keep one long; and I know a goodly number of men who are women in this regard.

An open sack hides nothing, And an open door hides little, but an open man is surely hiding something. lini is quoted by Nynaeve.