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The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

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
Embraced
Cross
Crosses
Mets
Save
Meaning
Ensign
Highest
Extrinsic
Ever
Accidental

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Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
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Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence of worth for more than one day?
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By nature man hates change seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
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Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!
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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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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
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A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
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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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Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
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A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant
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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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If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?
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Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
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Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
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We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
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