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Ammar

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“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

tags: integrity, self, strength

57 likes

“The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

tags: beauty-in-nature, sailing, sea, sherbet, summer, tropics

15 likes

“Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

4 likes

“I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practiced, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible, one occupies the place of the impossible.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

2 likes

“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

116 likes

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