Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
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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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He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.
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Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.
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Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.
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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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To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.
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The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
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The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.
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A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.
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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.
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Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.
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I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
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Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.
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The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad.
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A noble book! all men's book!
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We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
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Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
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No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
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The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
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A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
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Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.
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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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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.