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This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant I act under orders.
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
Ocean
Twas
Fate
Lieutenants
Fool
Fates
Order
Rolled
Whole
Orders
Years
Billion
Lieutenant
Billions
Rehearsed
Thee
Decreed
More quotes by Herman Melville
The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
Herman Melville
For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men well enough they know they are in peril well enough they know the causes of that peril--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
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
Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville
The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Herman Melville
Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.
Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
Herman Melville
See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
Herman Melville
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship by her, borrowed from the sea by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
Herman Melville
Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
Herman Melville
In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
Herman Melville
Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
Herman Melville
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
Herman Melville
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
Herman Melville
Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
Herman Melville
What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.
Herman Melville
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.
Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
The easiest way of life is the best.
Herman Melville
