Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
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Let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.
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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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The devil has his elect.
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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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Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
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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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Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
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For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
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There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
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All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
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All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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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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Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?
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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
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Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
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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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The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?
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The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
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Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.
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The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
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The best lesson which we get from the tragedy of Karbala is that Husain and his companions were rigid believers in God. They illustrated that the numerical superiority does not count when it comes to the truth and the falsehood. The victory of Husain, despite his minority, marvels me!
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Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.