This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.

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Notes from Wikiquote

Sometimes quoted as "Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream; Every idle moment is treason". The second of those two clauses in fact comes from Thomas Arnold The Christian Life (1841), Lecture VI.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Carlyle (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.