Herman Melville Quotes

I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'

When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it's been forgotten.

My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc.

Everything I do tries to do the same thing, which is to express things that are hard to express, hidden things.

How little do we discover in comparison of those things which now are and forever will be hidden from our sight? The whole of which I am fully persuaded no one will ever be able to dive into, and to explain their causes and effects.

However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.

I used the Internet as a vehicle to get places not many people did before.

Invisible things are the only realities.

Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.

General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

Abstract propositions should never be discussed by a legislative body.

I think that plain old intellectualism [can be] a more powerful force than the idea of the femme fatale.

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

Execute their airy purposes.

Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects; thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only.

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.

Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life.

There is no way back for me now, I'm going to take you on journeys you've never dreamed possible

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

Secrets you were telling everybody but me.. Don't be fooled by the money I'm still just young and unlucky, I'm surprised you couldn't tell

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.