Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.
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For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
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Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
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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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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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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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If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.
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Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
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A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
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Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
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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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Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.
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Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?
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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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Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
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Literature is the thought of thinking souls.
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Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
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On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.
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Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.
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There are remedies for all things but death.
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The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
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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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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.