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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

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
Person
Nothing
Aggravates
Earnest
Passive
Resistance
Persons

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Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
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We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before the world is not yet middle-aged.
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We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.
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In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
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The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
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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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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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Failure is the test of greatness.
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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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We are only what we are not what we would be nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
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If not against us, nature is not for us.
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It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
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Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.
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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.
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In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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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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What like a bullet can undeceive!
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Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
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