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Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.

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
Boon
Utter
Generous
Pleasant
Praise
Nature
Merited

More quotes by Herman Melville

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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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We are only what we are not what we would be nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
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Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.
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Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
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Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
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Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
Herman Melville
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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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In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.
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Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
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Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Herman Melville
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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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Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
Herman Melville
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No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville
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Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.
Herman Melville
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O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.
Herman Melville
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There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
Herman Melville