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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

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
Pity
Pain
Seldom
Sensitive

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In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
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Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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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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A thing may be incredible and still be true sometimes it is incredible because it is true.
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The Past is the textbook of tyrants the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
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Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
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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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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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The man's (a heathen south sea islander) a human being, just as I am he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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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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For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
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I will frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of- war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.
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Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not understand, human nature.
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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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Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?
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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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In childhood, death stirred me not in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
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