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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

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
Deals
Causes
Wholly
Action
Treat
Human
Treats
Humans
Deeds
Actions
Deal
Second

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Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
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How it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
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I never fancied broiling fowls - though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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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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The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
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Truth is in things, and not in words.
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We are only what we are not what we would be nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
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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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A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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We die, because we live.
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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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Nature is nobody's ally.
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A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
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See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
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