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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
Liberal
Catholic
Mind
Men
Unsuitable
Picnics
Rank
Arbitrary

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Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
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Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.
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For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
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Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
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He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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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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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
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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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Evil is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.
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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
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Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I look deep down and do believe.
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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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Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
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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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It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.
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I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
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In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.
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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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Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
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