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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

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
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Always
Ragged
Edges
Told
Literature
Truth

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See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
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The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
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But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.
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O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
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Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?
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The Past is the textbook of tyrants the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
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Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.
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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
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A thing may be incredible and still be true sometimes it is incredible because it is true.
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Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.
Herman Melville
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He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
Herman Melville