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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
Reality
Nothing
World
Contrast
Exists
Merely
Quality

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There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
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Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man and it is first in point of occurrence for the wife comes after.
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Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
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The easiest way of life is the best.
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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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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
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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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But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
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I am past scorching not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.
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Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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It is not down in any map true places never are.
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In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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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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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
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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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We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before the world is not yet middle-aged.
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