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As with ships, so with men he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.

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
Men
Foe
Ships
Advantage
Gives
Turns
Back
Giving

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My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
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beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
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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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The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
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An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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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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All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate-- Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate.
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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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Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.
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We die, because we live.
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That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
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Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
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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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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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I would prefer not to.
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Leviathan is not the biggest fish — I have heard of Krakens.
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