Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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My books are friends that never fail me.
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All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
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Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.
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The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
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For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
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There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.
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Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.
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The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.
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A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
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Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
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Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
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Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.
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Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
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Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
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It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
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How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
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What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
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Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
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Literature is the thought of thinking souls.
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Properly speaking, all true work is religion.
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Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
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Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.