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There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.

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
Things
Egotistical
Lofty
Towers
Climbing
Grand
Mountain
Ever
Something
Tops

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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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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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In childhood, death stirred me not in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
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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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The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
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The world is forever babbling of originality but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original the only original author being God.
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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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