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One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocence self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable 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
Soul
Mysterious
Trembles
Human
Dreams
Horrid
Humans
Thoughts
Jurisdiction
Individual
Innocence
Self
Dream
Depression
Thing
Stills
Spite
Think
Seems
Acknowledge
Unmentionable
Thinking
Still
Illness
Mutter

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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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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
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Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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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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Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
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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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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
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Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.
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Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
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All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.
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But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
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Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
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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.
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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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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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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
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