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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
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Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
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Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Failing
Conformity
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Individuality
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Originality
Life
Failure
Imitation
More quotes by Herman Melville
Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
Herman Melville
Let us pray that the great historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.
Herman Melville
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
Herman Melville
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
Herman Melville
This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant I act under orders.
Herman Melville
There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
Herman Melville
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
Herman Melville
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
Herman Melville
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
Herman Melville
It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
Herman Melville
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
Herman Melville
Let me look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better than to gaze upon God.
Herman Melville
I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, no matter how comical.
Herman Melville
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
Herman Melville
There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
Herman Melville
Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
Herman Melville
Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
Herman Melville
Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
Herman Melville
