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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?

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
Never
Principal
Quality
Literature
Gone
Nature
States

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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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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.
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Let us only hate hatred and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.
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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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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 fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.
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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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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
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The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
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Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
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Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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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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It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.
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