Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
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Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.
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Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
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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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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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A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
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He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.
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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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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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Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
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All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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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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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?
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Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.
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One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
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A man's perfection is his work.
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A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
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Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
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Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
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Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
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What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
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Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?
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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.