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Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

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
Self
Historical
Giving
Result
Long
Gives
Democracy
Results
Business
Running
Canceling
Nature
Zero

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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
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If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
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He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.
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If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.
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Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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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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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.
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I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
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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 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.
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What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay.
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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
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A very sea of thought neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.
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Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
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Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: A judicious man, says he, looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.
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