Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Man's earthly interests,'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
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Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy.
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Neither let mistakes and wrong directions - of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere, falls into many - discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will grow daily more and more right. It is, at bottom, the condition which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling - a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement! - it is emblematic of all things a man does.
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Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!
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When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof!
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Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
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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.
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The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
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He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.
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Nature admits no lie.
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The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
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Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.
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No violent extreme endures.
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Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.
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Habit is the deepest law of human nature.
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A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.
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Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting empires, - Necessity and Free Will.
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Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
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The great soul of this world is just.
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All great peoples are conservative.
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Creation is great, and cannot be understood.