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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

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
Feelings
Insist
Truth
Application
Play
Temporary
Men
Plays
Universal
Opinion
Feeling
Upon
Mischief

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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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If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.
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Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
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There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
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Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
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We die of too much life.
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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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A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.
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At length I fell asleep, with the volume in my hand and never slept so sound before
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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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Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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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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The Past is the textbook of tyrants the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
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No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
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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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As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
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Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man and it is first in point of occurrence for the wife comes after.
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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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