Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.
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The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.
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Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
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Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.
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The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.
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There is no permanent place in this universe for evil... Evil may hide behind this fallacy and that, but it will be hunted from fallacy to fallacy until there is no more fallacy for it to hide behind.
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O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
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A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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Lies exist only to be extinguished.
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
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Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
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Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?
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It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
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Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
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Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
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Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.