For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not blue the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and the softcymballing, round the harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. Herman Melville
Some Similar Quotes
  1. When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always. - Mahatma Gandhi
  2. They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now - Unknown
  3. Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. - Clive Barker
  4. Tonight I can write the saddest lines I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. - Pablo Neruda
  5. Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart. - Unknown
More Quotes By Herman Melville
  1. Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of...
  2. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish!...
  3. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's...
  4. Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
  5. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.
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