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Reform is not pleasant, but grievous no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle
Age: 85 †
Born: 1795
Born: December 4
Died: 1881
Died: February 5
Essayist
Historian
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Philosopher of Chelsea
Suffering
Less
Persons
Grievous
Person
Reformation
Without
Pleasant
Hard
Reform
Work
Nation
Much
Nations

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Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!
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Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.
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There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
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And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
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Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
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The merit of originality is not novelty it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
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By nature man hates change seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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We call it a Society and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
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The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
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Thought once awakened does not again slumber unfolds itself into a System of Thought grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
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The whole past is the procession of the present.
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The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
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All evil is like a nightmare the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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He that can work is born to be king of something.
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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
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Worship is transcendent wonder.
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The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles!
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Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.
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Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.
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