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None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to 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
Life
Rest
Lives
Living
Death
Doe
Really
Good
Belongs
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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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Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world deaf to its voice and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.
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That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
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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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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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For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
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Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
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A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.
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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.
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The man's (a heathen south sea islander) a human being, just as I am he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
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all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
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It is plain and demonstrable, that much ale is not good for Yankee, and operates differently upon them from what it does upon a Briton ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.
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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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There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
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The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
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I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil. (Ego baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.)
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