Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
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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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Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.
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Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.
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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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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.
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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
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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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Worship is transcendent wonder.
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He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
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Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
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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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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.
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Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.
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A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
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Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
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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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And man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell.
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The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
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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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Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.
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The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.