Quote

Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.

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
Love
Pass
Rainbow
Mists
Shadow
Shadows
Rainbows
Infinite
Regions
Airy
Mystery
Secrets
Whence
Thoughts
Bridges
Transcendent
Exhalations
Secret
Drop
Mist
Pertain
Though
Golden
Pearls
Engendered
Ever
Lovely
Mysteries
Poetical

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Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.
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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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...a man of true science uses few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose Where as the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
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A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
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Book! You lie there the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.
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Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
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Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
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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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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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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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There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
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Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
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If not against us, nature is not for us.
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
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Men there are, who having quite done with the world, all its merely worldly contents are become so far indifferent, that they carelittle of what mere worldly imprudence they may be guilty.
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An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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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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