Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
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Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.
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It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
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The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything.
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In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
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Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
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Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.
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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
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Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.
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To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.
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If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
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Produce, produce! Were it but the pitifulest, infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name. 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee? Out with it then! Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.
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A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man . . . A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.
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Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
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It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.
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Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
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Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
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Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
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Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
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One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!
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Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
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The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles!
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I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
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I too acknowledge the all-out omnipotence of early culture and nature; hereby we have either a doddered dwarf-bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree! either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their education,--what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it.