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O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!
Thomas Carlyle -
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.
Thomas Carlyle
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The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.
Thomas Carlyle -
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
Thomas Carlyle -
Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?
Thomas Carlyle -
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.
Thomas Carlyle -
France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
Thomas Carlyle -
Nature admits no lie.
Thomas Carlyle
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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
Thomas Carlyle -
That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,-for we have no word to speak about it.
Thomas Carlyle -
Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.
Thomas Carlyle -
"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith."
Thomas Carlyle -
Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
Thomas Carlyle -
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.
Thomas Carlyle
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Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
Thomas Carlyle -
In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
Thomas Carlyle -
Society is founded on hero-worship.
Thomas Carlyle -
The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.
Thomas Carlyle -
A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.
Thomas Carlyle -
This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.
Thomas Carlyle
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle -
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Thomas Carlyle -
When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
Thomas Carlyle -
Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other.
Thomas Carlyle