Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Feel it in thy heart and then say whether it is of God!
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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.
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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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He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
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The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
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The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
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Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
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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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Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
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Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.
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There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!
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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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Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?
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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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At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
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Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
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That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.
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The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.
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The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.
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A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.
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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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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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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.