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Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

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
Aliens
Thrown
Institutions
Assimilate
Elements
Digestion
However
Potent
May
Convert
Good
Originally
Time
Alien

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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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Youth is the time when hearts are large.
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Silence is the only Voice of our God.
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The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind but not the march of Love.
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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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You know nothing till you know all which is the reason we never know any thing.
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Truth is in things, and not in words.
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Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
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It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.
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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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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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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, cursesmix with tears and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own.
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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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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.
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If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
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A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
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We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls.
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