Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.
Interpretation
True creativity often stems from hard work and introspection.
In this quote, Herman Melville suggests that the lines of wisdom and understanding are shaped not by mere chance but rather by the struggles and efforts of individuals, symbolized by the 'furrowed brow.' This indicates that deep thought, experience, and labor contribute to one's insights and the depth of one's character, emphasizing the idea that wisdom is earned through life's challenges.
In practice
A speaker at a graduation ceremony might use this quote to emphasize the importance of perseverance in achieving success.
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results … We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world—although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating— and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it.
It makes Faith think of a hammock in their yard, a web of rope that she thought would unravel the first time she leaned back on it, but that managed to support her all the same.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.
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