"Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can."
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Quote collection
Thomas Carlyle quotes (page 12 of 41)
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"A good book is the purest essence of a human soul."
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"A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner."
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"The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home."
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"Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights."
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"Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one."
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"Is not light grander than fire?"
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"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."
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"A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth."
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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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"A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you."
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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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"No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes."
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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."
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"All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble."
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"All great peoples are conservative."
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"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
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"Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?"
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"A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing."
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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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