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 MELVILLEThere are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
More Herman Melville Quotes
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We cannot live for ourselves alone.
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There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
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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.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
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Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
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Yet habit – strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
HERMAN MELVILLE -
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
HERMAN MELVILLE -
The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
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The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
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When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.
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Failure is the test of greatness.
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Only the man who says no is free
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One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
HERMAN MELVILLE