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Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

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
Thou
Uncovered
Surface
Surfaces
Infinite
Hast
Mystery
Countenance
Face
Underlying
Beseeching
Space
Spells
Profounder
Faces
Visible
Evoking
Time
Dumb
Evoked

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Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
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A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
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contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.
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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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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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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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Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.
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It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.
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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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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
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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 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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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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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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A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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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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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
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