Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
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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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A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
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Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.
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The age of miracles is forever here.
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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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The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it.
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Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!
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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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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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There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
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Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
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Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
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All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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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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Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
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Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.
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Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
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A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.
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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
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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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Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.
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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?