Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts.
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Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.
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A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.
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Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
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Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
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Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.
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The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
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A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.
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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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Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
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The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
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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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Blessed be the God's voice; for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it!
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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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A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
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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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Every noble work is at first impossible.
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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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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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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!