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Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating and things will destroy themselves.

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
Things
Agitating
Debating
Destroy
Keep
Nothing

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
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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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A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
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Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all and there she but maunders and mumbles.
Thomas Carlyle
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Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.
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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Speech is great, but silence is greater.
Thomas Carlyle
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Reform is not pleasant, but grievous no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
Thomas Carlyle
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The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
Thomas Carlyle
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A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
Thomas Carlyle
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There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
Thomas Carlyle
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All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
Thomas Carlyle
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To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
Thomas Carlyle
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Nature admits no lie.
Thomas Carlyle
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We do everything by custom, even believe by it our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.
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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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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No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Thomas Carlyle