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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
Cordially
Lefties
Handed
Compliment
Hated
Literature
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More quotes by Herman Melville

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Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
Herman Melville
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Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
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Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
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In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
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A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.
Herman Melville
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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate-- Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate.
Herman Melville
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Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
Herman Melville
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
Herman Melville
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What like a bullet can undeceive!
Herman Melville
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Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.
Herman Melville
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truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
Herman Melville
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Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Herman Melville
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It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
Herman Melville
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Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?
Herman Melville
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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
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
Herman Melville
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Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.
Herman Melville
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Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
Herman Melville
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The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.
Herman Melville