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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such it is an accident, not a property of man.

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
Understand
Accident
May
Merit
Men
Accidents
Test
Tests
Property
Fame
Sure
Probability

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Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
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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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There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.
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Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
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All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
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A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.
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In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
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No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.
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Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.
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The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.
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Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!
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The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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The eye of the intellect sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.
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Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is... Even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work!
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The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.
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What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?
Thomas Carlyle