Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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There are remedies for all things but death.
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Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
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Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles.
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If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.
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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.
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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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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 A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control.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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To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?
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We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
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The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.
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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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All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
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To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
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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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An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
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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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If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command - Exit Christ.
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To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
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All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
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There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
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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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A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.