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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

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
Impossible
Open
Literature
Talk
Write
Helplessly
Without
Apparently
Writing
Throwing
Oneself

More quotes by Herman Melville

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The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
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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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The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.
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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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...a man of true science uses few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose Where as the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.
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There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan.
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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
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No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.
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