Thomas Carlyle Quotes
-
Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.
-
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
-
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
-
If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
-
All great peoples are conservative.
-
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
-
It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.
-
No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.
-
Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
-
The actual well seen is ideal.
-
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.
-
Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.
-
Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.
-
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.
-
Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
-
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
-
All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
-
The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.
-
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.
-
Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
-
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
-
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
-
Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man.
-
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.