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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.

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
Matter
Though
Volume
First
Moment
Author
World
Moments
Concern
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Poet
Still
Poetry
Firsts
Perhaps
Publication
Human
Events
Verses
Humans
Literature
Insignificant

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Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
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My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
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None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
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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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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself but is an errand-boy in heaven nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power how then can this one small heart beat this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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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.
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Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.
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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
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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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Failure is the test of greatness.
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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
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Let us only hate hatred and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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