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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

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
Memories
Beam
Dark
Oblivion
Read
Writes
Makes
Page
Light
Memory
Character
Pages
Nothing
Characters
Whereon
Writing
Darkness
Legible

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
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Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
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When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is not a lucky word, this name impossible no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.
Thomas Carlyle
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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
Thomas Carlyle
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Variety is the condition of harmony.
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If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
Thomas Carlyle
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As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can.
Thomas Carlyle
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
Thomas Carlyle
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Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.
Thomas Carlyle
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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
Thomas Carlyle
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Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.
Thomas Carlyle
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Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
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In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.
Thomas Carlyle
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Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
Thomas Carlyle
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Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
Thomas Carlyle
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Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life but only the house wherein our Life is led.
Thomas Carlyle
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A very sea of thought neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.
Thomas Carlyle