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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

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
Idleness
Perpetual
Despair

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Youth is to all the glad season of life but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
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Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
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Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
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Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.
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We do everything by custom, even believe by it our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.
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Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
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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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Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
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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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In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom we have to say, Like People like Government.
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Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
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Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?
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To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.
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Affectation is the product of falsehood.
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Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
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Thirty millions, mostly fools.
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