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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.

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
Putting
Despair
Hero
Democracy
Contented
Means
Govern
Mean
Heroes
Findings
Finding

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An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
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I want to meet my God awake.
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Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.
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The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is... Even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work!
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The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
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The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
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Blessed be the God's voice for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it!
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There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.
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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.
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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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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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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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Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
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Woe to him, . . . who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.
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If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
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The press is the fourth estate of the realm.
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A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
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No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.
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