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The man's (a heathen south sea islander) a human being, just as I am he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

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
Better
Sober
Human
Sea
Humans
South
Much
Afraid
Men
Sleep
Christian
Cannibal
Fear
Drunken
Reason
Heathen

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Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
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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.
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There never was a great man yet who spent all his life inland.
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Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.
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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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To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
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Youth is immortal Tis the elderly only grow old!
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Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
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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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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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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?
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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
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...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
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Failure is the test of greatness.
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The world is forever babbling of originality but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original the only original author being God.
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Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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The easiest way of life is the best.
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
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Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
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