Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
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Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
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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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Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
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Generations are as the days of toilsome mankind; death and birth are the vesper and the matin bells that summon mankind to sleep and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the father has made, the son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards: arts, establishments, opinions, nothing is ever completed, but ever completing.
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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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The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.
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A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
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Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
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Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
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No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
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Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
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We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.
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He that can work is born to be king of something.
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Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else.
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The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
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True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
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Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
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There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.
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Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
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My books are friends that never fail me.
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How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
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What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
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They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.