Darkness Quote by Herman Melville

“No man can ever feel his own identity aright excepr his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essence, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.” quote by Herman Melville — Download Open image

““No man can ever feel his own identity aright excepr his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essence, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.””

Herman Melville

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.9 out of 5 (4 ratings)

Darkness

More by Herman Melville

“and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.”

Herman Melville

Image

“But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;…

Herman Melville

“(On Ralph Waldo Emerson)I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he don't attain the bottom, why all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -but of the whole…

Herman Melville

“So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half…

Herman Melville

“the only real owner of anything is its commander;”

Herman Melville

Image

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the…

Herman Melville

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the…

Herman Melville

“Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this…

Herman Melville

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

Herman Melville

Image

Only the man who says no is free

Herman Melville

Image

Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.

Herman Melville

Image

“Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when-There she blows!-the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to…

Herman Melville

Explore all 1,010 Herman Melville quotes

More Darkness quotes

“Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence…

Nicole Krauss

“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried…

Flannery O'Connor

Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us…

Horace

Image

When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood…

Alexander Gordon Smith

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness. More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.

Adam Zagajewski

Image

I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images

Federico Fellini

Image

I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to…

Anne Lamott

“I promise to respect and protect your aloneness, knowing that everything created must have its period of darkness: child and bulb, poem and personality.…

anne morrow lindbergh