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Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

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
Ambition
Disease
Sure
Young
Mortal
Mortals
Greatness

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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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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
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Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
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Twelve o'clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine setting an eminent example to all mankind.
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Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.
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There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
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Let us only hate hatred and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.
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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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None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
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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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You cannot hide the soul.
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There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
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Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
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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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Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
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