Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.
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Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
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Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
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The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
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We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.
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Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
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Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
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We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
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Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?
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The mathematics of high achievement.
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He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
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Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
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Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.
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The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
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Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
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Let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.
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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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Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
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What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
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Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.