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

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Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.
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The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
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Society is founded on hero-worship.
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For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
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What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?
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Habit is the deepest law of human nature
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The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good but a calculation of the Profitable.
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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such it is an accident, not a property of man.
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The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
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The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
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Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
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The press is the fourth estate of the realm.
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A man perfects himself by working.
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The merit of originality is not novelty it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
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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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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
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There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.
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Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.
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