Herman Melville Quotes

This is where you can find your soul if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you've never dared look at before. Do not come here and ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind.

It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out ; so, in digging in one s soul for the fine gold of genius, much dulness and common-place is first brought to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but he is like the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse cannot be clapped into his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street before his own door, for the public functionaries to take care of.

I don't like the idea of spirituality done the way it's done. The only way I could understand it was through creativity, not by going to an Ashram, or finding a guru or joining a temple. I made work out of it.

To work on great material, what you really end up working on is yourself, your own humanity.

When I was making 'Xen,' I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn't deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.

You won't discover the limits of the soul, however far you go.

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

Visit your soul; don't visit your past.

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.

No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart...Delve into yourself for a deep answer

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.

A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Sometimes I need to be a stranger to myself. Only then my soul can show me not what I want, but what I need to see.

Music is like a mirror in front of you. You're exposing everything, but surely that's better than suppressing. You have to dig deep and that can be hard for anybody, no matter what profession. I feel that I need to actually push myself to the limit to feel happy with the end result.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

Having children made me go down a road of serious introspection and self-examination. I think it's informed and hopefully enhanced my creativity.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Dig deep. Find your way to your soul.