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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.

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
Seems
Trying
Make
Deception
People
Seem
Wealth
Rich
Poor
Business

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How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
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Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
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The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.
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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
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Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.
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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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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate-- Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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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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We die of too much life.
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O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
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There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
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There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.
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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before the world is not yet middle-aged.
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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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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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