Quote

The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.

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
Stills
Instead
Defects
Prodigies
Doe
Turn
Dreamer
Constitutions
Still
Modern
Description
Ancients
States
Turns
Ideal
Triumphant
Chimeras
Live
Artist
Reform
Successes
Impracticable
Great
Social
Ideals
Shameful
Deposited
Trying
Art
Constitution
Idealism
Chimera
Political
Works
Posterity
Perished

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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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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it and irresponsibility but without licentious inclination.
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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
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Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
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Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map true places never are.
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Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
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To the last, I grapple with thee From Hell's heart, I stab at thee For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
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But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
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The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn.
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We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound.
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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.
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The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
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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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As with ships, so with men he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
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As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
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