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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
Ancestry
Posterity
Grief
Joy

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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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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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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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A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
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If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.
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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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There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.
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In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.
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Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
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When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
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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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It is plain and demonstrable, that much ale is not good for Yankee, and operates differently upon them from what it does upon a Briton ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.
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You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
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Prayer draws us near to our own souls.
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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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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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The lightning flashes through my skull mine eyeballs ache and ache my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
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