Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
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All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
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What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
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When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar!
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Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.
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All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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The devil has his elect.
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The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
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Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
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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 is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.
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Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
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Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.
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Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
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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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Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
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Thought will not work except in silence.
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A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".
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Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
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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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Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
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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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Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.