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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.

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
Places
City
Cities
Seas
Two
Effectively
Men
Disappear
World
London
Sea
South

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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
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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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As with ships, so with men he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
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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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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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If not against us, nature is not for us.
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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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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
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Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
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When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.
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Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
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People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably -why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work -for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?
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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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Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.
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Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself but is an errand-boy in heaven nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power how then can this one small heart beat this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.
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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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