Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
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No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
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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?
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To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
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If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
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He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.
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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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In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.
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A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.
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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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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.
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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
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We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.
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Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.
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History is the new poetry.
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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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Wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses which he is loved and blessed by.
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Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.
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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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Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
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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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These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.