Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet.
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It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
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No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.
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The genuine essence of truth never dies.
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Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
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He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
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God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell.
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A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.
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The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
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The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!
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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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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
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Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.
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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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Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
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Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
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With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.
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Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.
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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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Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.
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Worship is transcendent wonder.