Thomas Carlyle Quotes
-
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
-
Endurance is patience concentrated.
-
A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
-
Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor.
-
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
-
Force, force, everywhere force; we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?" As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.
-
Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.
-
The whole past is the procession of the present.
-
If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
-
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
-
It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God's Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.
-
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.
-
The actual well seen is ideal.
-
The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.
-
Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
-
Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.
-
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
-
Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.
-
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!
-
The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.
-
Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.
-
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.
-
Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.
-
Every noble work is at first impossible.