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The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

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
Human
Insight
Humans
Woods
Real
Possession
Drawing
Knowledge
Water
Acquirement
Experience
Authentic
Soul
Wood

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See deep enough, and you see musically.
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He that can work is born to be king of something.
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Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
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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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The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
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The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.
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No man at bottom means injustice it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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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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Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
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Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
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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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All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
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The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good but a calculation of the Profitable.
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Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
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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 a man like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.
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The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being expand, if possible, to his full growth resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
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