Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
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All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
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This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.
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There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
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The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
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Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science.
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Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
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Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.
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France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
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It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
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In a certain sense all men are historians.
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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.
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
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Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
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The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
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I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
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Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any.
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
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True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
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The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
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The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.