Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.
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O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.
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Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
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History is the new poetry.
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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.
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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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Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
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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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There is so much data available to us, but most data won't help us succeed.
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Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
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Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
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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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Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?
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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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By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
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For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
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They only are wise who know that they know nothing.
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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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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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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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To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nusiance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissable manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith.