Quote

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.

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
Nothing
Fame
Like
Sure
Show
Probability
Understand
Accident
Given
Merit
Light
Test
Give
Tests
Little
Property

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
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Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
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Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.
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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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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
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Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
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Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.
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Great is wisdom infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated it is the highest achievement of man.
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Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
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And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
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Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
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Endurance is patience concentrated.
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The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
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Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
Thomas Carlyle