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The entire merit of a man can never be made known nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.

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
Never
Merit
Men
Letters
Entire
Names
Known
Read
Character
Demerits
Made
Sealed

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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
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We die of too much life.
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Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
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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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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man and it is first in point of occurrence for the wife comes after.
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When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.
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all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
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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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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.
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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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A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
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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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What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.
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...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Herman Melville