Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
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Thought will not work except in silence.
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The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
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The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
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We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
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The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.
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Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
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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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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
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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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Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
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Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.
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If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command - Exit Christ.
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Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
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He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
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If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?
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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
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But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.
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No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.
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Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men.
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Biography is the only true history.
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Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
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The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.