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Leviathan is not the biggest fish — I have heard of Krakens.

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
Fish
Fishes
Biggest
Heard
Kraken
Leviathan

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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
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At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a sharp, cold Christmas and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.
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What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.
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Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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To the last, I grapple with thee From Hell's heart, I stab at thee For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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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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A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
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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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The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
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...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
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beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
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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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