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When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.

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
Overflow
Companionship
Companion
Emotion
Best
Nothing
Heart
Overflows

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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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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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Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
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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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There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
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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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Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
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Men there are, who having quite done with the world, all its merely worldly contents are become so far indifferent, that they carelittle of what mere worldly imprudence they may be guilty.
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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If not against us, nature is not for us.
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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.
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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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Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
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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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