Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
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He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.
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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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We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
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Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
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A man's perfection is his work.
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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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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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Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
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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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It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
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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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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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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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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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In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.
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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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No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
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No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
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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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Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
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History is the new poetry.