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We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before the world is not yet middle-aged.

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
Instead
Teacher
Shall
Pupil
Middle
Pupils
Possible
Aged
Gone
Posterity
Come
Prove
World
Generations

More quotes by Herman Melville

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Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.
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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
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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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There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
Herman Melville
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He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.
Herman Melville
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Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
Herman Melville
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None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
Herman Melville
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For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men well enough they know they are in peril well enough they know the causes of that peril--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
Herman Melville
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The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
Herman Melville
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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
Herman Melville
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If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.
Herman Melville
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I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
Herman Melville
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
Herman Melville
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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.
Herman Melville
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You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
Herman Melville
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
Herman Melville
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Where is there such an one who has not a thousand times been struck with a sort of infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be Lord of, he is not the Lord of this for else this world would seem to give the lie to Him so utterly repugnant seem its ways to the instinctively known ways of Heaven.
Herman Melville