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Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.

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
Fighting
Forty
Easy
Personally
Another
Smoke
Reason
Direct
Thing
Battle
Years
Involved
Combatant
Ought
Obscuring
Fire
Fought

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Nature is nobody's ally.
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Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
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Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?
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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.
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There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.
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Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.
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If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.
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Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.
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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.
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If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
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The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
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Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.
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There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
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The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind but not the march of Love.
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He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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