Thomas Carlyle Quotes
-
The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
-
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
-
That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.
-
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
-
There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!
-
A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.
-
The Highest Being reveals himself in man.
-
But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible rights. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint. Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all.
-
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
-
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
-
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
-
Laughter means sympathy.
-
Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
-
The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.
-
True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
-
Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.
-
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
-
Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
-
Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
-
To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.
-
Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.
-
Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
-
Produce, produce! Were it but the pitifulest, infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name. 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee? Out with it then! Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.
-
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.