Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
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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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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!
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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.
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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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Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
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The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
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There are remedies for all things but death.
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Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.
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There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
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Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
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Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.
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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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Love not Pleasure; love God.
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Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
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The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
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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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The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.
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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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Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
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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.
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Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.
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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!