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If not against us, nature is not for us.

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
Nature

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Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
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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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Truth is in things, and not in words.
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Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
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How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.
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You know nothing till you know all which is the reason we never know any thing.
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The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
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Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
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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.)
Herman Melville
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Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
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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?
Herman Melville
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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
Herman Melville
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Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man and it is first in point of occurrence for the wife comes after.
Herman Melville
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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
Herman Melville
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...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Herman Melville
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A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
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Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
Herman Melville