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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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Show me the man you honor I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.
Thomas Carlyle
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Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
Thomas Carlyle
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Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is... Even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work!
Thomas Carlyle
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Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.
Thomas Carlyle
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A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!
Thomas Carlyle
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What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
Thomas Carlyle
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We call it a Society and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
Thomas Carlyle
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Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
Thomas Carlyle
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The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.
Thomas Carlyle
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The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.
Thomas Carlyle
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Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
Thomas Carlyle
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The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.
Thomas Carlyle
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Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
Thomas Carlyle
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Parliament will train you to talk and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.
Thomas Carlyle
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The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being expand, if possible, to his full growth resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.
Thomas Carlyle
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Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
Thomas Carlyle
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A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.
Thomas Carlyle
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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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Music is well said to be the speech of angels in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
Thomas Carlyle
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Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.
Thomas Carlyle