Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Consider in fact, a body of six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons, set to consult about "business," with twenty-seven millions, mostly fools, assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them. Was there ever, since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any "business" accomplished in these circumstances?
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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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I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
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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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Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
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Affectation is the product of falsehood.
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All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
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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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The archenemy is the arch stupid!
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Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
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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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A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.
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Time has only a relative existence.
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In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men.
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Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
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The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
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Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
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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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Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
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Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
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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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The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
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The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.