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People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.

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
Looks
Many
Great
Seem
Good
Knowing
Things
Names
Love
Knowledge
Like
Seems
People
Look

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We are not a nation, so much as a world for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.
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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
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The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
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Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.
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Nature is nobody's ally.
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The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
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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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There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
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Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not understand, human nature.
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Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
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The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run
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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
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There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.
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Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.
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A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.
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In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
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...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
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