"A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world."
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Quote collection
Thomas Carlyle quotes (page 34 of 41)
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"The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin"
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"On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal."
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"O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner."
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"Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation."
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"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."
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"Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill."
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"Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,-imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,-"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of-the air!" Richter: German humorist & prose writer."
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"To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant"
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"There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?"
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"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books."
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"The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity."
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"Thought will not work except in silence."
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"Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning."
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"A collection of books is the best of all universities."
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"There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter."
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"The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself."
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"The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception."
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"Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy"
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"History after all is the true poetry."
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