Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
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Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
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The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
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We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
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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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One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
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We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
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If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
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Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.
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Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
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To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
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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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The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
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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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The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
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Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
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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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The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.
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Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
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Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
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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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Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.
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Man is a tool-using animal.