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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.

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
Longer
Calculations
Virtue
Profitable
Beautiful
Finite
Character
Passed
Good
Absolutes
Absolute
Worship
Conditional
Infinite
Calculation

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War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
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The best lesson which we get from the tragedy of Karbala is that Husain and his companions were rigid believers in God. They illustrated that the numerical superiority does not count when it comes to the truth and the falsehood. The victory of Husain, despite his minority, marvels me!
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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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Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay's, and mere words.
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
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No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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Speech is great, but silence is greater.
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By nature man hates change seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
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All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.
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There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
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Obedience is our universal duty and destiny wherein whoso will not bend must break too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that would, in this world of ours, is a mere zero to should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to shall.
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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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Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
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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.
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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.
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Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.
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Caution is the lower story of prudence.
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