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But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.

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
Land
Careless
Way
Caves
Men
Flowing
River
Endless
Whither
Rivers
Winding
Follow
Cave
Shall
Reckless

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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?
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
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The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
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If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
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It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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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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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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There are hardly five critics in America and several of them are asleep.
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That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
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I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
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The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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The shadows of things are greater than themselves and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
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