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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.

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
Life
Analytical
Defy
Precise
Strongest
Subtle
Insight
Emotions
Causation
Emotion
Tracing

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In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
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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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There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.
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But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
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Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
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Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
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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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The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.
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All truth is profound.
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Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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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 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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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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Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
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Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I look deep down and do believe.
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Failure is the test of greatness.
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There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
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Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
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