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The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

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
Men
Despise
World
Reverence
Neglect
Learn
Must
Even
Thing
Work

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Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
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Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
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Youth is to all the glad season of life but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.
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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
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The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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A star is beautiful it affords pleasure, not from what it is to do, or to give, but simply by being what it is. It befits the heavens it has congruity with the mighty space in which it dwells. It has repose no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has freedom no obstruction lies between it and infinity.
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All great peoples are conservative.
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Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful yet ever needful and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
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It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.
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I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.
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Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
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A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
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Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
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With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
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