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

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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
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A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
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Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
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Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
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A man perfects himself by working.
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A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
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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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The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
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How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?
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Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.
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Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
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Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.
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It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.
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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
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Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
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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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You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words supply and demand.
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No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.
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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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