Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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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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Give us, O give us the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time . . . he will do it better . . . he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible to fatigue while he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres.
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Debt is a bottomless sea.
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That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
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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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Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.
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They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.
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My books are friends that never fail me.
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I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
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Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
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Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
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Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
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One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
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As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can.
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One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.
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Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.
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The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
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Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
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He that can work is born to be king of something.
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Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
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Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.