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A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.

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
Happiness
Rather
Laughable
Thing
Scarce
Good
Mighty
Laughter
Laugh
Laughing
Joy

More quotes by Herman Melville

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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world deaf to its voice and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.
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.
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Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it and irresponsibility but without licentious inclination.
Herman Melville
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We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
Herman Melville
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Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map true places never are.
Herman Melville
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Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.
Herman Melville
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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
Herman Melville
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The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
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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The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
Herman Melville
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Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
Herman Melville
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In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
Herman Melville
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None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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I am past scorching not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
Herman Melville
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The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.
Herman Melville
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville
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People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.
Herman Melville