Quote

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!

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
Upon
Worm
Truth
Perish
Shoreless
Better
Worms
Craven
Even
Safety
Dashed
Would
Infinite
Indefinite
Like
Highest
Howling
Land
Resides
Alone
Crawl

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Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
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truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
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beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
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Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.
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Silence is the only Voice of our God.
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Nature is nobody's ally.
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Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.
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I never fancied broiling fowls - though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.
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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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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.
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There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
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When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
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You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
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