Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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.
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Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
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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.
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Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
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Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.
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He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
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He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
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Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
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No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.
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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
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No person is important enough to make me angry.
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Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
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"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith."
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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
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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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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.
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Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man.
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Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
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All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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.