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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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A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.
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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.
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Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
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No man at bottom means injustice it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.
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To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.
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Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
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They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.
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There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
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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.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
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Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.
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There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
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All great peoples are conservative.
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Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Thomas Carlyle
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
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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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Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.
Thomas Carlyle