Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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All great peoples are conservative.
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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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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
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Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
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The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
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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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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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The greatest security against sin is to be shocked at its presence.
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No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.
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All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
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Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
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Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.
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Fancy that thou deservest to be hangedthou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged ina hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.
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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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Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
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Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
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Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man.
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The actual well seen is ideal.
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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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Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
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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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He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
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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.