Quotes from Typee — Herman Melville
1819–1891
← All quotes by Herman Melville
7 quotes
Insensible as he is to a thousand wants, and removed from harassing cares, may not the savage be the happier man of the two?
Typee (1846)
The French have ever plumed themselves upon being the most humane and polished of nations.
Typee (1846)
Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.
Typee (1846)
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the act of smoking. How captivating is a Peruvian lady, swinging in her gaily-woven hammock of grass, extended between two orange-trees, and inhaling the fragrance of a choice cigarro!
Typee (1846)
The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.
Typee (1846)
When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the ‘big canoe’ of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the viper whose sting is destined to poison all their joys.
Typee (1846)
At the Sandwich Islands, Kaahumanu, the gigantic old dowager queen — a woman of nearly four hundred pounds weight, and who is said to be still living at Mowee — was accustomed, in some of her terrific gusts of temper, to snatch up an ordinary sized man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee. Incredible as this may seem, it is a fact. While at Lahainaluna — the residence of this monstrous Jezebel — a humpbacked wretch was pointed out to me, who, some twenty-five years previously, had had the vertebrae of his backbone very seriously discomposed by his gentle mistress.
Typee (1846)