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

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time.
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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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Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.
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Leaders: Captains of industry.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
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A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
Thomas Carlyle
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
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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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It is meritorious to insist on forms religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
Thomas Carlyle
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My books are friends that never fail me.
Thomas Carlyle
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Thought is the parent of the deed.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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The greatest fault is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
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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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Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.
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And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
Thomas Carlyle