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A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

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
Sadness
Misery
Waste
Space
Inhabited
Spectacle
Scope
Folly

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Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
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Violence does even justice unjustly.
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The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.
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Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
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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 he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows
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Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
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Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
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My books are friends that never fail me.
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
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He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.
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There is so much data available to us, but most data won't help us succeed.
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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 world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
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The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.
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Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.
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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
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The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
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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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Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
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All evil is like a nightmare the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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