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

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If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.
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Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
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Nature is nobody's ally.
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The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion.
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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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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.
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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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For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men well enough they know they are in peril well enough they know the causes of that peril--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
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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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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.
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When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
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There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
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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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for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
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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 may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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