Quote

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

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Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
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Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
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Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
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A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.
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I would prefer not to.
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We die of too much life.
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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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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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Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
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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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Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
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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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For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
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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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There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.
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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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