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In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

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
Since
Dumplings
Word
Ramadan
Rather
Perpetuated
Idea
Nurtured
Born
Hereditary
Ideas
Apple
Firsts
Apples
First
Hell
Undigested

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When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.
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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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Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.
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I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.
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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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Nature is nobody's ally.
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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
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It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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Some dying men are the most tyrannical and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
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Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
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A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
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It is not down in any map true places never are.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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But I shall follow the endless, winding way, — the flowing river in the cave of man careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.
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What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
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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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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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