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If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.

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
Water
Plain
Stick
Luxury
Sticks
Shun
Avoid
Abstinence
Wine
Costly
Rich
Indulgence
Poor
Fatal

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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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Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.
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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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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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The Past is the textbook of tyrants the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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I am past scorching not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
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All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.
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What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
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Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
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He, who, in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it.
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It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
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We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
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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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Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
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Silence is the only Voice of our God.
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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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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As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.
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But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
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