{
  "type": "quote",
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/herman-melville/the-confidence-man/quite-an-original",
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  "text": "\"QUITE AN ORIGINAL:\" A phrase, we fancy, rather oftener used by the young, or the unlearned, or the untraveled, than by the old, or the well-read, or the man who has made the grand tour. Certainly, the sense of originality exists at its highest in an infant, and probably at its lowest in him who has completed the circle of the sciences.",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Herman Melville",
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    "title": "The Confidence-Man",
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    {
      "name": "knowledge",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:55:34",
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      "slug": "the-mind-is-ductile",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/herman-melville/the-confidence-man/the-mind-is-ductile",
      "text": "The mind is ductile, very much so: but images, ductilely received into it, need a certain time to harden and bake in their impressions, otherwise such a casualty as I speak of will in an instant obliterate them, as though they had never been. We are but clay, sir, potter's clay, as the good book says, clay, feeble, and too-yielding clay.",
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      "slug": "to-be-full",
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      "text": "To be full of warm, earnest words, and heart-felt protestations, is to create a scene; and well-bred people dislike few things more than that; which would seem to look as if the world did not relish earnestness; but, not so; because the world, being earnest itself, likes an earnest scene, and an earnest man, very well, but only in their place — the stage.",
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    {
      "id": "c6c6e4fc-172c-4f62-a64f-9dfd59bb8c03",
      "slug": "you-have-hearkened",
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      "text": "You have hearkened to my story in vain, if you do not see that, however indulgent and right-minded I may seem to you now, that is no guarantee for the future. And into the power of that uncertain personality which, through the mutability of my humanity, I may hereafter become, should not common sense dissuade you, my dear Frank, from putting yourself?",
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