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There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship by her, borrowed from the sea by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

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
Life
Borrowed
Tides
Ship
Rolling
Ships
Imparted
Thee
Inscrutable
Sea
Rocking
Except
Gently

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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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Standing navies, as well as standing armies, serve to keep alive the spirit of war even in the meek heart of peace. In its very embers and smoulderings, they nourish that fatal fire, and half-pay officers, as the priests of Mars, yet guard the temple, though no god be there.
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Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
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You cannot hide the soul.
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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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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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Nature is nobody's ally.
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The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
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beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
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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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Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
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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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Let me look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better than to gaze upon God.
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My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
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In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
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I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
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