The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
HERMAN MELVILLEA smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
More Herman Melville Quotes
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All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do–remember that–and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.
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Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
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All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter’s ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Nature is nobody’s ally.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
HERMAN MELVILLE -
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
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Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
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What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
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I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.
HERMAN MELVILLE