“Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand.”
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
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Thomas Carlyle 481
Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881Related quotes

“Of the nine red cards this season we probably deserved half of them.”
7 April 1999
Quotations from the Public Comments of Arsene Wenger: Manager, Arsenal Football Club (2005)

Source: The Philosophy of Education (His 1889 book)

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
Context: If a soul is born with divine intelligence, and has its lips touched with hallowed fire, in consecration for high enterprises under the sun, this young soul will find the question asked of him by England every hour and moment: "Canst thou turn thy human intelligence into the beaver sort, and make honest contrivance, and accumulation of capital by it? If so, do it; and avoid the vulpine kind, which I don't recommend. Honest triumphs in engineering and machinery await thee; scrip awaits thee, commercial successes, kingship in the counting-room, on the stock-exchange;—thou shalt be the envy of surrounding flunkies, and collect into a heap more gold than a dray-horse can draw. "—"Gold, so much gold?" answers the ingenuous soul, with visions of the envy of surrounding flunkies dawning on him; and in very many cases decides that he will contract himself into beaverism, and with such a horse-draught of gold, emblem of a never-imagined success in beaver heroism, strike the surrounding flunkies yellow. This is our common course; this is in some sort open to every creature, what we call the beaver career; perhaps more open in England, taking in America too, than it ever was in any country before. And, truly, good consequences follow out of it: who can be blind to them? Half of a most excellent and opulent result is realized to us in this way; baleful only when it sets up (as too often now) for being the whole result.

“I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.”
George Bernard Shaw on Sinclair Lewis receiving the Nobel Prize (1930)

“The PLAYSTATION3 will retail for Five-Hundred-Ninety-Nine US Dollars.”
"Back to the Dump" (p.414)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.”
As quoted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1995) edited by Lawrence Sutin, p. x.