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Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

— Herman Melville Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

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More quotes by Herman Melville

Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity — reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel — Art.

Timoleon (1891)

In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.

But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852)

We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

White-Jacket (1850)

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)

All Herman Melville quotes →

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All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Herman Melville (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.