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The easiest way of life is the best.

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
Life
Easiest
Best
Way

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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
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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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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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But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
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Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
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All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
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for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
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The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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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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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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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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Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.
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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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You know nothing till you know all which is the reason we never know any thing.
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As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
Herman Melville