Herman Melville Quotes

The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

No one may do evil that good may come.

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

It is not difficult to avoid death. It is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

From the days of Cain and Abel, we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn't take away our freedoms.

I pray as follows: May justice reign, may the laws not be broken, may the wise men be poor, and the poor men rich, without sin.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

There are good characters and bad characters.

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.

No one who is in this world will deny that evils exist. What, then, do we say? That evil is not a living and animated substance, but a condition of the soul which is opposed to virtue and which springs up In the slothful because of their falling away from good.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Goodness is something that makes us serene and content; it is magnificent. Those who are not good are evil.

Heaven takes care that no man secures happiness by crime.

It is better to lose everything you have to keep the balance of justice level, than to live a life of petty privilege devoid of true freedom.

I love devils.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil.