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Book! You lie there the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

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
Come
Thoughts
Must
Books
Giving
Lying
Fact
Words
Facts
Bare
Give
Supply
Book
Places

More quotes by Herman Melville

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Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
Herman Melville
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Some dying men are the most tyrannical and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
Herman Melville
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For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
Herman Melville
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That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
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There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.
Herman Melville
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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
Herman Melville
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The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
Herman Melville
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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
Herman Melville
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
Herman Melville
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All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
Herman Melville
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There are hardly five critics in America and several of them are asleep.
Herman Melville
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To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
Herman Melville
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O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Men there are, who having quite done with the world, all its merely worldly contents are become so far indifferent, that they carelittle of what mere worldly imprudence they may be guilty.
Herman Melville