Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?
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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 A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control.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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Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
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Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
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Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
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History: A distillation of rumor.
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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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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
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A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".
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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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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
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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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A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
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There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.
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The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
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Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.
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To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.
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The public is anold woman.Let her maunderand mumble.
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There are remedies for all things but death.
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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.
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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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It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.
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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.