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The Past is the textbook of tyrants the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

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
Stand
Textbook
Wife
Textbooks
Forever
Backward
Looking
Governed
Future
Solely
Free
Tyrants
Past
Incapable
Like
Bible
Crystallized

More quotes by Herman Melville

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It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
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Nature is nobody's ally.
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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.
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It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
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The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.
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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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The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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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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A thing may be incredible and still be true sometimes it is incredible because it is true.
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Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
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The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
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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.
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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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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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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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