Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.
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Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest to thee," which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.
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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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The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.
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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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With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.
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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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Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
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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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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
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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. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else.
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Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
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The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
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The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
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Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.
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The age of miracles is forever here.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
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There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
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Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.
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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
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Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise!
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The purpose of man is in action not thought.
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Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
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One monster there is in the world, the idle man.