The Confidence-Man Quotes

“Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“But truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life. As elsewhere, experience is the only guide here; but as no one man’s experience can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“The sky slides into blue, the bluffs into bloom; the rapid Mississippi expands; runs sparkling and gurgling, all over in eddies; one magnified wake of a seventy-four. The sun comes out, a golden huzzar, from his tent, flashing his helm on the world. All things, warmed in the landscape, leap. Speeds the daedal boat as a dream.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“The devil is very sagacious. To judge by the event, he appears to have understood man better even than the Being who made him.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“Through tears never did man see his way in the dark.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“Every heart is ice-bound till wine melt it, and reveal the tender grass and sweet herbage budding below, with every dear secret, hidden before like a dropped jewel in a snow-bank, lying there unsuspected through winter till spring.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“Those who thought they best knew her, often wondered what happiness such a being could take in life, not considering the happiness which is to be had by some natures in the very easy way of simply causing pain to those around them.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“Nothing like preserving in manhood the fraternal familiarities of youth.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

“You are an abolitionist, ain't you?"

"As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean a zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody's interest, and therefore, rousing nobody's enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say."

"Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.”
― Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man