“A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

— Herman Melville , book Moby-Dick

Source: Moby-Dick

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." by Herman Melville?

Herman Melville 144

American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet 1818–1891

Related quotes

“Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“Disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter III: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals — continued", page 105 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=118&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: As quoted in Pearls of Wisdom: A Harvest of Quotations From All Ages (1987) by Jerome Agel and Walter D. Glanze, p. 46. From The Importance of Living: "besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone" (p. 162), "the wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials" (p. 10).

“All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Lines Written In Dejection http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1524/, st. 1
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
Context: When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.

“A thousand touching traits testify to the sacred power of the love which a righteous war awakes in noble nations.”

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) Historian, political writer

German History, Volume I, p. 482.

“A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

"Heroic Reason", as translated by H. R. Hays, in Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957) edited by Eugenio Florit, p. 231.
Context: A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence.