Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.
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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
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My books are friends that never fail me.
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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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The actual well seen is ideal.
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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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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Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
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An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
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All great peoples are conservative.
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Leaders: Captains of industry.
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Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.
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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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The greatest security against sin is to be shocked at its presence.
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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.
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Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.
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Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man.
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That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,-for we have no word to speak about it.
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Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
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Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.