Thomas Carlyle Quotes
-
Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?
-
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
-
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.
-
Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
-
Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
-
How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
-
The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
-
The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
-
We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
-
Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
-
The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.
-
No pressure, no diamonds.
-
One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
-
Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.
-
A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
-
The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
-
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
-
May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
-
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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?
-
The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
-
Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.