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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
World
Contrast
Exists
Merely
Quality
Reality
Nothing

More quotes by Herman Melville

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If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
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Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
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Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.
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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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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
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People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.
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Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
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Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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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.
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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
Herman Melville
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Failure is the test of greatness.
Herman Melville
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The world is forever babbling of originality but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original the only original author being God.
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We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
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Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
Herman Melville