Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
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Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
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Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
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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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All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
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Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.
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It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
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Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
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He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
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Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
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No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.
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Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
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For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
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Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.
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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
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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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Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
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Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.
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Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break; too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that "would," in this world of ours, is a mere zero to "should," and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to "shall.
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Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
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How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.