Quote

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

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
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No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.
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No violent extreme endures.
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A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
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Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.
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Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.
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A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him.
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Force, force, everywhere force we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot? [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]
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God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.
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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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It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
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persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy
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O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!
Thomas Carlyle
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The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
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There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.
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Love not Pleasure love God.
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.
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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
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Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
Thomas Carlyle