Herman Melville Quotes

So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.

I do suspect that this world is hell.

In our lives, we have good things and bad things, happiness and pain.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

We have darkness as human beings.

That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.

There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, and sand eddies in a whirlwind.

HAPPY EVER AFTER is a concept I'll never believe in. I would be content to sample some little taste of happiness today, tonight, right now. Though I know without a doubt that tomorrow will come saturated with pain. Life is like that. At least my life. And honestly, I cant think of anyone whose life is any different. The price tag for joy is misery. [...]

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.

To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair

Seeing the Way is like going into a dark room with a torch; the darkness instantly departs, while the light alone remains. When the Way is attained and the truth is seen, ignorance vanishes and enlightenment abides forever.

How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; And e'en the dearest--that I love the best-- Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

The dark today leads into light tomorrow. There is no endless joy, and yet no endless sorrow.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

By Chivalries as tiny, A Blossom, or a Book, The seeds of smiles are planted- Which Blossom in the dark.

"What is good for a bootless bene?" With these dark words begins my tale; And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring When prayer is of no avail?

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

The gift of the Truth beats all other gifts. The flavour of the Truth beats all other tastes. The joy of the Truth beats all other joys, and the cessation of desire conquers all suffering

What strange beings we are! That sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we're afraid of our own immortality.