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Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

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
Grief
Joy
Ancestry
Posterity

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A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
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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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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
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Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
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I will frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of- war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.
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for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
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Failure is the test of greatness.
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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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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.
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The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
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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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The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind but not the march of Love.
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
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Leviathan is not the biggest fish — I have heard of Krakens.
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There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.
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