Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
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A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
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In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men--genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion.
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Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
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Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
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The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
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Love not Pleasure; love God.
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Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
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No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
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Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
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A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the almighty have lived by and died by?
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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
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Lies exist only to be extinguished.
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
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The whole past is the procession of the present.
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The greatest security against sin is to be shocked at its presence.
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Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.
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Contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting around a large long table...Perfect equality is to be the rule; no rising or notice taken when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks; if he cannot smoke...let him at least affect to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things.
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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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Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
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Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.
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O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!