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Superstition! That Horrid Incubus Which Dwelt In Darkness, Shunning The Light, With All Its Racks, And Poison Chalices, And Foul Sleeping Draughts, Is Passing Away Without Return. Religion Cannot Pass Away. The Burning Of A Little Straw May Hide The Stars Of The Sky; But The Stars Are There And Will Reappear.

-Thomas Carlyle

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Superstition! That Horrid Incubus

Thomas Carlyle

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Superstition! That Horrid Incubus Which Dwelt In Darkness, Shunning The Light, With All Its Racks, And Poison Chalices, And Foul Sleeping Draughts, Is Passing Away Without Return. Religion Cannot Pass Away. The Burning Of A Little Straw May Hide The Stars Of The Sky; But The Stars Are There And Will Reappear.

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With Stupidity And Sound Digestion, Man May Front Much.

The Situation That Has Not Its Duty, Its Ideal, Was Never Yet Occupied By Man. Yes, Here, In This Poor, Miserable, Hampered, Despicable Actual, Wherein Thou Even Now Standest, Here Or Nowhere Is Thy Ideal; Work It Out Therefrom, And, Working, Believe, Live, Be Free. Fool! The Ideal Is In Thyself.

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.

A Thinking Man Is The Worst Enemy The Prince Of Darkness Can Have; Every Time Such An One Announces Himself, I Doubt Not There Runs A Shudder Through The Nether Empire; And New Emissaries Are Trained With New Tactics, To, If Possible, Entrap And Hoodwink And Handcuff Him.

There Is No Permanent Place In This Universe For Evil... Evil May Hide Behind This Fallacy And That, But It Will Be Hunted From Fallacy To Fallacy Until There Is No More Fallacy For It To Hide Behind.

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Not On Morality, But On Cookery, Let Us Build Our Stronghold: There Brandishing Our Frying-pan, As Censer, Let Us Offer Sweet Incense To The Devil, And Live At Ease On The Fat Things He Has Provided For His Elect!

Debt Is A Bottomless Sea.

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If You Look Deep Enough You Will See Music; The Heart Of Nature Being Everywhere Music.

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If An Eloquent Speaker Speak Not The Truth, Is There A More Horrid Kind Of Object In Creation?

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We Observe With Confidence That The Truly Strong Mind, View It As Intellect Or Morality, Or Under Any Other Aspect, Is Nowise The Mind Acquainted With Its Strength; That Here The Sign Of Health Is Unconsciousness.

The Greatest Mistake Is To Imagine That We Never Err.

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.

Nothing Is More Terrible Than Activity Without Insight.

Clean Undeniable Right, Clear Undeniable Might: Either Of These Once Ascertained Puts An End To Battle. All Battle Is A Confused Experiment To Ascertain One And Both Of These.

Stern Accuracy In Inquiring, Bold Imagination In Describing, These Are The Cogs On Which History Soars Or Flutters And Wobbles.

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The Suffering Man Ought Really To Consume His Own Smoke; There Is No Good In Emitting Smoke Till You Have Made It Into Fire.

History Is The Essence Of Innumerable Biographies.

My Whinstone House My Castle Is, I Have My Own Four Walls.

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The Builder Of This Universe Was Wise, He Plann'd All Souls, All Systems, Planets, Particles: The Plan He Shap'd All Worlds And Æons By, Was-heavens!-was Thy Small Nine-and-thirty Articles!

I Never Heard Tell Of Any Clever Man That Came Of Entirely Stupid People.

The Greatest Fault Is To Be Conscious Of None.

History Is A Great Dust Heap.

What Is Nature? Art Thou Not The Living Government Of God? O Heaven, Is It In Very Deed He Then That Ever Speaks Through Thee, That Lives And Loves In Thee, That Lives And Loves In Me?

Love Is Ever The Beginning Of Knowledge As Fire Is Of Light.

It's A Man's Sincerity And Depth Of Vision That Makes Him A Poet.

Thirty Millions, Mostly Fools.

Authors Are The Vanguard In The March Of Mind, The Intellectual Backwoodsmen, Reclaiming From The Idle Wilderness New Territories For The Thought And Activity Of Their Happier Brethren.

To The Wisest Man, Wide As Is His Vision. Nature Remains Of Quite Infinite Depth, Of Quite Infinite Expansion And All Experience Thereof Limits Itself To Some Few Computed Centuries And Measured Square Miles.

Labor, Wide As The Earth, Has Its Summit In Heaven.

Silence, The Great Empire Of Silence: Higher Than All Stars; Deeper Than The Kingdom Of Death! It Alone Is Great; All Else Is Small.

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History Is A Mighty Dramos, Enacted Upon The Theatre Of Times, With Suns For Lamps And Eternity For A Background.

The Three Great Elements Of Modern Civilization, Gun Powder, Printing, And The Protestant Religion.

Violence Does Even Justice Unjustly.

You Can Make Even A Parrot Into A Learned Political Economist - All He Must Learn Are The Two Words "supply" And "demand."

All Great Peoples Are Conservative.

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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.

No Great Man Lives In Vain. The History Of The World Is But The Biography Of Great Men.

What Is All Knowledge Too But Recorded Experience, And A Product Of History; Of Which, Therefore, Reasoning And Belief, No Less Than Action And Passion, Are Essential Materials?

Song Is The Heroics Of Speech.

One Must Verify Or Expel His Doubts, And Convert Them Into The Certainty Of Yes Or No.

How Great A Possibility, How Small A Realized Result.

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Society Is Founded Upon Cloth.

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All True Work Is Sacred.

See Deep Enough, And You See Musically.

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A Good Book Is The Purest Essence Of A Human Soul.

No Country Can Find Eternal Peace And Comfort Where The Vote Of Judas Iscariot Is As Good As The Vote Of The Saviour Of Mankind.

The Highest Being Reveals Himself In Man.

Close Thy Byron ; Open Thy Goethe .

Courtesy Is The Due Of Man To Man; Not Of Suit-of-clothes To Suit-of-clothes.

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Science Must Have Originated In The Feeling That Something Was Wrong.

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The Nobleness Of Silence. The Highest Melody Dwells Only In Silence,--the Sphere Melody, The Melody Of Health.

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The Essence Of Humor Is Sensibility; Warm, Tender Fellow-feeling With All Forms Of Existence.

What You See, But Can't See Over Is As Good As Infinite.

The Real Use Of Gunpowder Is To Make All Men Tall.

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Labor Is Life: From The Inmost Heart Of The Worker Rises His God-given Force, The Sacred Celestial Life-essence Breathed Into Him By Almighty God!

The All Importance Of Clothes Has Sprung Up In The Intellect Of The Dandy Without Effort, Like An Instinct Of Genius; He Is Inspired With Clothes, A Poet Of Clothes.

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Is Not Light Grander Than Fire? It Is The Same Element In A State Of Purity.

The Genuine Essence Of Truth Never Dies.

A Stammering Man Is Never A Worthless One. Physiology Can Tell You Why. It Is An Excess Of Sensibility To The Presence Of His Fellow Creature, That Makes Him Stammer.

Rare Benevolence, The Minister Of God.

Hardened Round Us, Encasing Wholly Every Notion We Form Is A Wrapping Of Traditions, Hearsay's, And Mere Words.

By Nature Man Hates Change; Seldom Will He Quit His Old Home Till It Has Actually Fallen Around His Ears.

Speech Is Human, Silence Is Divine, Yet Also Brutish And Dead: Therefore We Must Learn Both Arts.

The Hell Of These Days Is The Fear Of Not Getting Along, Especially Of Not Making Money.

The World Is An Old Woman, And Mistakes Any Gilt Farthing For A Gold Coin; Whereby Being Often Cheated, She Will Thenceforth Trust Nothing But The Common Copper.

He Who Could Foresee Affairs Three Days In Advance Would Be Rich For Thousands Of Years.

It Is Meritorious To Insist On Forms; Religion And All Else Naturally Clothes Itself In Forms. Everywhere The Formed World Is The Only Habitable One.

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.

When The Oak Is Felled The Whole Forest Echoes With It Fall, But A Hundred Acorns Are Sown In Silence By An Unnoticed Breeze.

Wise Man Was He Who Counselled That Speculation Should Have Free Course, And Look Fearlessly Towards All The Thirty-two Points Of The Compass, Whithersoever And Howsoever It Listed.

Isolation Is The Sum Total Of Wretchedness To A Man.

'genius' Which Means Transcendent Capacity Of Taking Trouble, First Of All.

Of All God's Creatures, Man Alone Is Poor.

Hero-worship Exists, Has Existed, And Will Forever Exist, Universally, Among Mankind.

Genuine Work Alone, What Thou Workest Faithfully, That Is Eternal, As The Almighty Founder And World-builder Himself.

Respectable Professors Of The Dismal Science.

Once The Mind Has Been Expanded By A Big Idea, It Will Never Go Back To Its Original State.

Men Do Less Than They Ought, Unless They Do All They Can.

Conviction Never So Excellent, Is Worthless Until It Coverts Itself Into Conduct.

In Every Object There Is Inexhaustible Meaning; The Eye Sees In It What The Eye Brings Means Of Seeing.

The Bible Is The Truest Utterance That Ever Came By Alphabetic Letters From The Soul Of Man, Through Which, As Through A Window Divinely Opened, All Men Can Look Into The Stillness Of Eternity, And Discern In Glimpses Their Far-distant, Long-forgotten Home.

Skepticism . . . Is Not Intellectual Only It Is Moral Also, A Chronic Atrophy And Disease Of The Whole Soul.

Man Is, Properly Speaking, Based Upon Hope, He Has No Other Possession But Hope; This World Of His Is Emphatically The Place Of Hope.

Evil, Once Manfully Fronted, Ceases To Be Evil; There Is Generous Battle-hope In Place Of Dead, Passive Misery; The Evil Itself Has Become A Kind Of Good.

Enjoying Things Which Are Pleasant; That Is Not The Evil; It Is The Reducing Of Our Moral Self To Slavery By Them That Is.

The Man Who Cannot Wonder, Who Does Not Habitually Wonder (and Worship), Were He President Of Innumerable Royal Societies, And Carried The Whole Mecanique Celeste And Hegel's Philosophy, And The Epitome Of All Laboratories And Observatories With Their Results, In His Single Head, Is But A Pair Of Spectacles Behind Which There Is No Eye. Let Those Who Have Eyes Look Through Him, Then He May Be Useful.

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.

The Deadliest Sin Were The Consciousness Of No Sin

Originality Is A Thing We Constantly Clamour For, And Constantly Quarrel With.

Funny Basketball

The Coldest Word Was Once A Glowing New Metaphor.

Thought Is The Parent Of The Deed.

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It Is A Vain Hope To Make People Happy By Politics.

Every Man Is My Superior In That I May Learn From Him.

The True Church Of England, At This Moment, Lies In The Editors Of The Newspapers.

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Metaphysics Is The Attempt Of The Mind To Rise Above The Mind.

Nature Admits No Lie.

History Is The Distillation Of Rumour.

Have Not I Myself Known Five Hundred Living Soldiers Sabred Into Crows' Meat For A Piece Of Glazed Cotton, Which They Call Their Flag; Which Had You Sold It At Any Market-cross, Would Not Have Brought Above Three Groschen?

A False Man Found A Religion? Why, A False Man Cannot Build A Brick House!

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Democracy Will Prevail When Men Believe The Vote Of Judas As Good As That Of Jesus Christ.

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Bricks And Mortar

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Custom Doth Make Dotards Of Us All.

There Is A Great Discovery Still To Be Made In Literature, That Of Paying Literary Men By The Quantity They Do Not Write.

It Is The Heart Always That Sees, Before The Head Can See.

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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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Wondrous Is The Strength Of Cheerfulness, Altogether Past Calculation Its Powers Of Endurance.

Good Breeding Differs, If At All, From High Breeding Only As It Gracefully Remembers The Rights Of Others, Rather Than Gracefully Insists On Its Own Rights.

We Are Not Altogether Here To Tolerate. We Are Here To Resist, To Control And Vanquish Withal.

Little Other Than A Red Tape Talking-machine, And Unhappy Bag Of Parliamentary Eloquence.

There Is Always Hope In A Man That Actually And Earnestly Works: In Idleness Alone Is There Perpetual Despair.

He Who Would Write Heroic Poems Should Make His Whole Life A Heroic Poem.

A Strong Mind Always Hopes, And Has Always Cause To Hope.

Work Is The Grand Cure Of All The Maladies And Miseries That Ever Beset Mankind.

There Must Be A New World If There Is To Be Any World At All!... These Days Of Universal Death Must Be Days Of Universal New Birth, If The Ruin Is Not To Be Total And Final! It Is Time To Make The Dullest Man Consider; And Ask Himself, Whence He Came? Whither He Is Bound?

The Graceful Minuet-dance Of Fancy Must Give Place To The Toilsome, Thorny Pilgrimage Of Understanding. On The Transition From The Age Of Romance To That Of Science.

Nakedness, Hunger, Distress Of All Kinds, Death Itself Have Been Cheerfully Suffered, When The Heart Was Right. It Is The Feeling Of Injustice That Is Insupportable To All Men.

I Had A Lifelong Quarrel With God, But In The End We Made Up.

Nature, After All, Is Still The Grand Agent In Making Poets.

Superstition! That Horrid Incubus Which Dwelt In Darkness, Shunning The Light, With All Its Racks, And Poison Chalices, And Foul Sleeping Draughts, Is Passing Away Without Return. Religion Cannot Pass Away. The Burning Of A Little Straw May Hide The Stars Of The Sky; But The Stars Are There And Will Reappear.

History Shows That The Majority Of People That Have Done Anything Great Have Passed Their Youth In Seclusion.

The Glory Of A Workman, Still More Of A Master Workman, That He Does His Work Well, Ought To Be His Most Precious Possession; Like The Honor Of A Soldier, Dearer To Him Than Life.

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.

The Goal Of Yesterday Will Be Our Starting-point To-morrow.

No Pressure, No Diamonds.

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.

We Have Profoundly Forgotten Everywhere That Cash-payment Is Not The Sole Relation Of Human Beings.

All Human Souls, Never So Bedarkened, Love Light; Light Once Kindled Spreads Till All Is Luminous.

Contented Saturnine Human Figures, A Dozen Or So Of Them, Sitting Around A Large Long Table...perfect Equality Is To Be The Rule; No Rising Or Notice Taken When Anybody Enters Or Leaves. Let The Entering Man Take His Place And Pipe, Without Obligatory Remarks; If He Cannot Smoke...let Him At Least Affect To Do So, And Not Ruffle The Established Stream Of Things.

Narrative Is Linear, But Action Has Breadth And Depth As Well As Height And Is Solid.

Not One False Man But Doth Uncountable Evil.

Blessed Is He Who Has Found His Work; Let Him Ask No Other Blessedness.

Virtue Is Like Health: The Harmony Of The Whole Man.

Skepticism Means, Not Intellectual Doubt Alone, But Moral Doubt.

There Are But Two Ways Of Paying Debt: Increase Of Industry In Raising Income, Increase Of Thrift In Laying Out.

Happy Season Of Childhood! Kind Nature, That Art To All A Bountiful Mother; That Visitest The Poor Man's Hut With Auroral Radiance; And For Thy Nursling Hast Provided A Soft Swathing Of Love And Infinite Hope Wherein He Waxes And Slumbers, Danced Round By Sweetest Dreams!

Know What Thou Canst Work At, And Work At It Like A Hercules.

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