Quote

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.

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
Seen
Tables
Dogs
Carved
Animal
Red
Smoking
Tossed
Though
Hungry
Ships
Gazing
Fighting
Horror
Round
Bolts
Every
Dog
Killed
Amid
Men
Sea
Rounds
Sharks
Longingly
Like
Fight
Table
Deck
Decks
Ready
Meat
Ship
Bolt

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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
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Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
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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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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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There are hardly five critics in America and several of them are asleep.
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In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.
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In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.
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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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But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
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A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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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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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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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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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.
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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 hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
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