Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
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The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
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The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
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Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
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Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
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Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.
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At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.
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Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
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Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.
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Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
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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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Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.
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It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
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Thought will not work except in silence.
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We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.
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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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Properly speaking, all true work is religion.
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The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
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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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Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
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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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Biography is the only true history.