Thomas Carlyle Quotes
-
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
-
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.
-
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
-
Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
-
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.
-
They only are wise who know that they know nothing.
-
In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.
-
Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.
-
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
-
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
-
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
-
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
-
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.
-
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.
-
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.