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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

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
Books
Book
Great
Life
Triviality
Alone

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The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
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Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
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In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
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There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.
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For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
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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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Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.
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Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
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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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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
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After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
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Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
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The Persians are called the French of the East we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people a people of wildstrong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noblemindedness, of genius.
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Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.
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What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it
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Biography is the only true history.
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Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
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