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Failure is the test of greatness.

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
Tests
Greatness
Failure
Test

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Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.
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Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.
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There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
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For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
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Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.
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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
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If not against us, nature is not for us.
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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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Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
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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.
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The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
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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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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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Honor lies in the mane of a horse.
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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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Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
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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
Herman Melville
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
Herman Melville