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All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

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
Earth
Independence
Conspire
Soul
Sea
Wildest
Thinking
Deep
Treacherous
Wind
Winds
Open
Earnest
Effort
Shore
Heaven
Cast
Intrepid
Keep
Casts
Slavish

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It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
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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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Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
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Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.
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For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
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Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
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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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Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.
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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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Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
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Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
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Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.
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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.
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All truth is profound.
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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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