The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
Interpretation
Mistakes are valuable lessons that contribute to our learning and growth.
This quote emphasizes the importance of embracing our mistakes rather than feeling ashamed of them. Thomas Carlyle highlights that understanding our errors is a crucial form of self-education, suggesting that learning from our shortcomings helps us develop wisdom and improve ourselves.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing challenges.
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.
I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?
We must make up our minds to be ignorant of much, if we would know anything.
Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.
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