The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
Interpretation
Even in difficult times, the concept of eternity offers solace and perspective.
This quote by Thomas Carlyle suggests that when life and time present challenges and hostility, the idea of eternity can provide a sense of grandeur and kindness. It implies that a broader perspective, such as thinking about eternity, can help us endure and find meaning amidst hardships because it elevates our understanding beyond immediate struggles.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming adversity, one might quote this to inspire resilience.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thirty millions, mostly fools.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
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.
People have learned by bitter experience that the "European fraternal union of peoples" cannot be achieved by mere phrases and pious wishes, but only by profound revolutions and bloody struggles; they have learned that the question is not that of a fraternal union of all European peoples under a single republican flag, but of an alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which comes into being not on paper, but only on the battlefield.
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
We must be convinced that abundance is the natural state of the Universe. To experience and accept abundance in our life, we must be convinced that as we conceive and believe, the Universe handles the details.
To a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation.
On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.
The dice of God are always loaded.
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