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Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.

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
Unsuitable
Picnics
Rank
Arbitrary
Liberal
Catholic
Mind
Men

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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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Stay true to the dreams of thy youth.
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Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
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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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Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
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No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
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It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
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O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
Herman Melville
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There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship by her, borrowed from the sea by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
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Twelve o'clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine setting an eminent example to all mankind.
Herman Melville
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Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.
Herman Melville
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A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
Herman Melville