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Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.

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
Nothing
World
Solemn
Eternity
Meaning
Events
Gone
Happens
Ever

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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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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One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
Thomas Carlyle
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Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.
Thomas Carlyle
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He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.
Thomas Carlyle
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The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
Thomas Carlyle
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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?
Thomas Carlyle
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Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay's, and mere words.
Thomas Carlyle
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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
Thomas Carlyle
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The scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the pit follow it.
Thomas Carlyle
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With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
Thomas Carlyle
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The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
Thomas Carlyle
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Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under learn from it, turn it to account.
Thomas Carlyle
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Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of--the air!
Thomas Carlyle
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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
Thomas Carlyle
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What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
Thomas Carlyle
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
Thomas Carlyle
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Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Thomas Carlyle
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All evil is like a nightmare the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
Thomas Carlyle