Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
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Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.
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Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
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No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.
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The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
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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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An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
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Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
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I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
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That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
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Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men.
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A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
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Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.
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Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
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A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
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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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Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.
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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.
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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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Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
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One seems to believe almost all that they believe; and when they stop short and call it a Religion, and you pass on, and call it only a reminiscence of one, should you not part with the kiss of peace?
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Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.
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The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.