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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.

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
Better
Twenties
Secure
King
Oneself
Kings
Violence
Monarchs
Millions
Exposed
Though
Twenty

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Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
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The lightning flashes through my skull mine eyeballs ache and ache my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
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One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
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Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
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You cannot hide the soul.
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Silence is the only Voice of our God.
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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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There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
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The world is forever babbling of originality but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original the only original author being God.
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A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.
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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.
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People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.
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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.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
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Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
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Some dying men are the most tyrannical and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
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In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.
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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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