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It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
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
Seems
Wills
May
Sailor
Men
Fond
World
Testament
People
Seem
Testaments
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Tinkering
Lasts
Sailors
Last
Diversion
More quotes by Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
Herman Melville
There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
Herman Melville
For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
Herman Melville
When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.
Herman Melville
The man's (a heathen south sea islander) a human being, just as I am he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Herman Melville
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Herman Melville
In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
Herman Melville
He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
Herman Melville
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
Herman Melville
The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.
Herman Melville
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
Herman Melville
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.
Herman Melville
Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Herman Melville
Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.
Herman Melville
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
Herman Melville
That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
Herman Melville
Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
Herman Melville