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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.

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
Knowing
Believers
Though
Ill
Suffering
Gods
Doe
Believer
Things
Goodness
Men
Gratitude
Omniscient
Love
Sweet
Oblivious
Full
Idiotic

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You cannot hide the soul.
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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To the last, I grapple with thee From Hell's heart, I stab at thee For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
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That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.
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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.
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At banquets surfeit not, but fill partake, and retire and eat not again till you crave.
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Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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Book! You lie there the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.
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Leviathan is not the biggest fish — I have heard of Krakens.
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For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .
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What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
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The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.
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All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
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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.
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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
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There are hardly five critics in America and several of them are asleep.
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
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