Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
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Money will buy money's worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?
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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
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At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.
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A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
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Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
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A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.
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Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
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A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
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He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
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The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad.
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The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.
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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
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The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
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A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
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Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.
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Generations are as the days of toilsome mankind; death and birth are the vesper and the matin bells that summon mankind to sleep and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the father has made, the son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards: arts, establishments, opinions, nothing is ever completed, but ever completing.
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
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It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.
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I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
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The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.
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Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
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Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
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Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.
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History after all is the true poetry.
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We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
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In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men--genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion.
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