Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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A man's perfection is his work.
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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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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
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To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
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He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.
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The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
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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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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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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.
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Thought will not work except in silence.
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History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
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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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It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
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In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.
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Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
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A noble book! all men's book!
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Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.
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High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.
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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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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.
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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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I call that Book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.
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Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.