Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
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The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
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What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it
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Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
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Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!
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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
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I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
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The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.
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Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
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It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
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Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
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The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin.
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
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History: A distillation of rumor.
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You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."
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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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Show me the man you honor; I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.
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There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.
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A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".
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No person is important enough to make me angry.