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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
Good
Belongs
Men
None
Life
Rest
Lives
Living
Death
Doe
Really

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No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
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O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.
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The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
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Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
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Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.
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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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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
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Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
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Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
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Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
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At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a sharp, cold Christmas and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.
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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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What like a bullet can undeceive!
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The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
Herman Melville
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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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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Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
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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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