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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
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Rolled
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Billion
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Billions
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Thee
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Ocean
Twas
Fate
Lieutenants
Fool
Fates

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Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.
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Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
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At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand and never slept so sound before
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
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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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Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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...a man of true science uses few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose Where as the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
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When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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It is not down in any map true places never are.
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Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.
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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.
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Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.
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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.
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Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
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