Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Man is a tool-using animal.
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Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?
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History is the new poetry.
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Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
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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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Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
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Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.
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Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
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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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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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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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If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
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Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.
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The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.
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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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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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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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If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
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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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A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.
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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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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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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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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.