Herman Melville

“Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning. Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 1851); published in Memories of Hawthorne (1897) by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, p. 158”

“The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?) Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (June 1, 1851).”

“Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips”

“In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous”

“Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory”

“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne . We mean the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the usable truth ever entered more deeply than into this man's. By usable truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him,”

“It will be a strange sort of book , tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;”

“And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over Shakspeare , that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk.”

“I do not oscillate in Emerson 's rainbow , but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug”

“Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William . Ah, he's full of sermons”