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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!

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
Cranes
Round
Tailor
Rounds
Tailors
Spindle
Appear
Artifice
Necked
Forth
Stripped
Shouldered
Sorry
Eden
Artifices
Standing
Cunning
Garb
Would
Crane
Men
Civilized

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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
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Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
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This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant I act under orders.
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We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
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He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.
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Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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