"At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet."
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Quote collection
Thomas Carlyle quotes (page 22 of 41)
820 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded."
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"We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?"
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"In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream."
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"Consider in fact, a body of six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons, set to consult about "business," with twenty-seven millions, mostly fools, assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them. Was there ever, since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any "business" accomplished in these circumstances?"
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"It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with."
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"Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence."
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"Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?"
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"The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive."
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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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"Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?"
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"Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise."
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"Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood."
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"Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt."
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"He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing."
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"Variety is the condition of harmony."
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"All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible."
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"Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul."
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"The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it."
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"To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow."
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