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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
Thomas Carlyle -
There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
Thomas Carlyle -
The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.
Thomas Carlyle -
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
Thomas Carlyle -
Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.
Thomas Carlyle -
There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
Thomas Carlyle -
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.
Thomas Carlyle
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The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
Thomas Carlyle -
Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle -
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Thomas Carlyle -
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
Thomas Carlyle -
One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
Thomas Carlyle -
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Thomas Carlyle
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The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.
Thomas Carlyle -
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.
Thomas Carlyle -
They only are wise who know that they know nothing.
Thomas Carlyle -
Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?
Thomas Carlyle -
The greatest of all heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.
Thomas Carlyle -
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
Thomas Carlyle
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Time has only a relative existence.
Thomas Carlyle -
Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.
Thomas Carlyle -
These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.
Thomas Carlyle -
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle