Thomas Carlyle Quotes
-
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
-
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
-
Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.
-
On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.
-
Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.
-
Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
-
That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
-
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-
With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
-
Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.
-
The actual well seen is ideal.
-
Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
-
The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
-
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
-
There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
-
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
-
If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.
-
Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.
-
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
-
What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!
-
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
-
The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
-
All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
-
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.