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We are not a nation, so much as a world for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.

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
Father
Mother
Without
Sire
Much
Claim
Like
Claims
World
Unless
Nation
Nations

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Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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Silence is the only Voice of our God.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world deaf to its voice and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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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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Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I look deep down and do believe.
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The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.
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At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright goodfeeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless--well, finish the sentence for yourself.
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Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.
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What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed.
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It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
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I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
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How it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
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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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Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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