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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.

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
Instead
Apathy
Saying
Circumstance
Action
Architect
Would
Creature
Men
Empathy
Mark
Creatures
Mortar
Circumstances
Nearer

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A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.
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If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
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An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
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There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
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A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the almighty have lived by and died by?
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Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
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Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.
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No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
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What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
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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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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
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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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Nature admits no lie.
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The true epic of our times is not Arm's and the Man, but Tools and the Man--an infinitely wider kind of epic.
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Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant
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Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.
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In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
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Caution is the lower story of prudence.
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Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
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