No pressure, no diamonds. - Thomas Carlyle

Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence, I owe him a noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he exclusively that determined on educating me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself honorably forth into new generations.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word and deed. It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made.