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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.

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
Work
Swimmer
Men
Threatens
Vast
Fronts
Ocean
Front
Word
Bravely
Keep
Devour

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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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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Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky but the stars are there and will reappear.
Thomas Carlyle
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The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
Thomas Carlyle
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'Genius' which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all.
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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Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
Thomas Carlyle
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History is the new poetry.
Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
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Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.
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Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: A judicious man, says he, looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.
Thomas Carlyle
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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
Thomas Carlyle
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Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
Thomas Carlyle
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The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.
Thomas Carlyle
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To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.
Thomas Carlyle
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He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.
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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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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Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.
Thomas Carlyle
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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
Thomas Carlyle