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There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

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
Merely
Quality
Reality
Nothing
World
Contrast
Exists

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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.
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I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
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Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
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As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
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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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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
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Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
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Standing navies, as well as standing armies, serve to keep alive the spirit of war even in the meek heart of peace. In its very embers and smoulderings, they nourish that fatal fire, and half-pay officers, as the priests of Mars, yet guard the temple, though no god be there.
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It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
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Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
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contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.
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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.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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How it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
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