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To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

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
Literature
Left
Cordially
Lefties
Handed
Compliment
Hated

More quotes by Herman Melville

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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
Herman Melville
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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
Herman Melville
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
Herman Melville
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No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
Herman Melville
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Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
Herman Melville
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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
Herman Melville
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Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
Herman Melville
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We die of too much life.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
Herman Melville
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Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
Herman Melville
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
Herman Melville
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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
Herman Melville
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
Herman Melville
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Truth is in things, and not in words.
Herman Melville
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Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.
Herman Melville
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He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.
Herman Melville
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Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.
Herman Melville
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A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
Herman Melville