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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

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
Everywhere
Question
Action
True
Life
Gain
Gains

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If you look deep enough you will see music the heart of nature being everywhere music.
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Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
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Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.
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The purpose of man is in action not thought.
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The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
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What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
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Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.
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God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!
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You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words supply and demand.
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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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Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
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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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Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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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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All great peoples are conservative.
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