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Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?

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
Like
Wants
Selfishness
Woes
People
Pleasure
Regardless
Corpse
Suffering
Fellow
Woe
Pain
Fellows
Corpses
Making
Charity
Merry
House
Follow
Pains
Given
Sitting
Surrounded
Men
Dead
Pleasures

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One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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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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All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
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People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably -why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work -for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?
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The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
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Ladies are like creeds if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.
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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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The world is forever babbling of originality but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original the only original author being God.
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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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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
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It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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Failure is the test of greatness.
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He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.
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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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As with ships, so with men he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
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Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
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