Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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.
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Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!
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Caution is the lower story of prudence.
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The greatest security against sin is to be shocked at its presence.
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This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
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Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
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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.
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If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
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No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
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A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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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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Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
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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.
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The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
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Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
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O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, "here or nowhere," couldst thou only see.
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If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
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Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
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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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What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it
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A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.
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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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Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.