Herman Melville Quotes

Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge-just so much as show that still It ends in ignorance on every side.

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

The utmost extent of man's knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

No mortal man, moreover is wise at all moments.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.

Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind.

Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn't know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

In truth, the world is a complicated place.

I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.