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A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

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
Work
Fields
Jungle
Perfects
Men
Instead
Seed
Unwholesome
Cities
Desert
Jungles
Working
Seeds
Stately
Society
Cease
Cleared
Away
Fairs
Ceases
Firsts
Rise
Thereby
First
Fair
Foul

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Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant
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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.
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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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Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
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In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.
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A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
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Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
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The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
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It is meritorious to insist on forms religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
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A thought once awakened does not again slumber.
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We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.
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Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.
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A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.
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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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The greatest fault is to be conscious of none.
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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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