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For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

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
Books
Literature
Whatever
Words
Wondrous
Fear
Librarian
Book
Fearful
Never
Library
Men
Truly

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Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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We die, because we live.
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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.
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When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.
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All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
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Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
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You cannot hide the soul.
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See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
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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.
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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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How it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
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The easiest way of life is the best.
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There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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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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I would prefer not to.
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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.
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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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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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