Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
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The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.
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The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
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He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
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It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
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A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
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A fair day's wage for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.
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Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
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Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.
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The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.
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Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
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Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
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Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
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The errors of a wise man are literally more instructive than the truths of a fool. The wise man travels in lofty, far-seeing regions; the fool in low-lying, high-fenced lanes; retracing the footsteps of the former, to discover where he diviated, whole provinces of the universe are laid open to us; in the path of the latter, granting even that he has not deviated at all, little is laid open to us but two wheel-ruts and two hedges.
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The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.
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At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
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Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.
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All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.
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Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
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Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.
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Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.
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A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
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Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?
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It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.