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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
Quality
Reality
Nothing
World
Contrast
Exists
Merely

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It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind but not the march of Love.
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A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.
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We are only what we are not what we would be nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.
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Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
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The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
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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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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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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright goodfeeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless--well, finish the sentence for yourself.
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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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Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
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