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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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
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Stranger
May
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More quotes by Herman Melville
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
The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
Herman Melville
It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.
Herman Melville
Let me look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better than to gaze upon God.
Herman Melville
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
Herman Melville
If not against us, nature is not for us.
Herman Melville
The shadows of things are greater than themselves and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.
Herman Melville
Silence is the only Voice of our God.
Herman Melville
Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.
Herman Melville
truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
Herman Melville
A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
Herman Melville
The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
Herman Melville
My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
Herman Melville
Twelve o'clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine setting an eminent example to all mankind.
Herman Melville
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
Herman Melville
We are only what we are not what we would be nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
Herman Melville
