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We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

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
Greatness
Love

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.
Thomas Carlyle
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Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
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No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
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For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
Thomas Carlyle
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Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.
Thomas Carlyle
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All work is as seed sown it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.
Thomas Carlyle
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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
Thomas Carlyle
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Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating and things will destroy themselves.
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The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
Thomas Carlyle
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Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
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In a certain sense all men are historians.
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Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.
Thomas Carlyle
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I want to meet my God awake.
Thomas Carlyle
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There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
Thomas Carlyle
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
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If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
Thomas Carlyle
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The true epic of our times is not Arm's and the Man, but Tools and the Man--an infinitely wider kind of epic.
Thomas Carlyle