Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.
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But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible rights. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint. Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all.
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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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At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
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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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The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.
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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
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Thought is the parent of the deed.
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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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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.
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If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
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Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.
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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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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
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The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
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It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
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Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.
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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 All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
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When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
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It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.
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Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
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A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.