Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
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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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Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
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Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
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Thought is the parent of the deed.
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I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
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In a certain sense all men are historians.
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Silence is more eloquent than words.
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Love not Pleasure; love God.
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Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.
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A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
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I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
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If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at little. And in the course of years when you come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers,-and among many counsellors there is wisdom,-you will bitterly repent when it is too late.
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A thought once awakened does not again slumber.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.
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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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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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Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.
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France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
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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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This is the eternal law of Nature for a man, my beneficent Exeter-Hall friends; this, that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that.