Meaning of “I should make some advance in life, take…”

Sartor Resartus, Book II, Chapter IX, “The Everlasting Yea,” printed page 156 / Wikisource scan leaf 188 in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896). “The Ideal is in thyself” occurs in the same spiritual-enfranchisement passage, where Teufelsdröckh argues that the present “Actual” supplies the material to shape an inward Ideal. This collection retains that fictional, metaphysical and explicitly religious frame rather than converting it into modern clinical or self-esteem doctrine.

Self-Control, Its Kingship and Majesty, “The Kingship of Self-Control.” Project Gutenberg #51469. The line belongs to late-nineteenth-century self-mastery literature and is not evidence that circumstance is irrelevant.

The Woman’s Bible, Stanton commentary; the line appears in her critique of idealizing women’s self-sacrifice and is preserved in the Project Gutenberg text.

Thrift, Chapter II, “Habits of Thrift,” Project Gutenberg #14418. In a discussion of self-improvement and moral independence, Smiles presents self-respect as the impulse that makes a person rise, develop intelligence and improve condition.

Self-Control, Its Kingship and Majesty, later discussion of individual possibility. The sentence is motivational rhetoric about human potential rather than a measurable universal prediction.

Walt Whitman, 'Song of the Open Road,' section 5 in the represented 1882 Leaves of Grass text. 'I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness' follows the speaker's declaration of being loosed from imagined limits. It remains poetic first-person self-discovery rather than empirical psychology.