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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.

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
Many
Written
Rare
Men
Almost
Spent
Life
Rich
Deserve
History
Record
Persons
Certainly
Biography
Able
Whose
Recorded
Wells
Records
Biographies
Well
Willing
Deserves

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Thought once awakened does not again slumber unfolds itself into a System of Thought grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
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Society is founded on hero-worship.
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By nature man hates change seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
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A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
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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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In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.
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Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
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Violence does even justice unjustly.
Thomas Carlyle
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And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
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Without kindness there can be no true joy.
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O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.
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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
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Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
Thomas Carlyle
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Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
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Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither it is devilish.
Thomas Carlyle
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History is a great dust heap.
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Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
Thomas Carlyle
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In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world the world's Priest -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
Thomas Carlyle