Truth is in things, and not in words.
Interpretation
Truth is found in reality and experiences rather than in verbal expressions or descriptions.
Herman Melville's quote emphasizes the idea that true understanding and authenticity come from tangible experiences and the world around us, rather than being solely reliant on the interpretations and limitations of language. It suggests that words can often distort or fail to capture the essence of reality, highlighting the importance of seeking truth through direct engagement with the physical world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the philosophy of language.
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.
Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
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