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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.

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
Every
Scale
Would
Scales
Perfection
Step
Steps
Humanity
Hope
Thing
Reaches

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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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In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.
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In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.
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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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A thing may be incredible and still be true sometimes it is incredible because it is true.
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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.
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We die, because we live.
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When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.
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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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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.
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In childhood, death stirred me not in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
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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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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
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In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.
Herman Melville
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Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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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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Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
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Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
Herman Melville